Limitations and websites

daverupert.com

20 points·skilled··4 comments

> We never speak about websites through the lens of CPU, RAM, power consumption, thermals, or FPS limitations

It's worth going for the 'mobile first' approach and assume your visitors have the bare minimum specs for browsing your website. Obviously if you're doing a big clunky SPA you need to warn your visitors beforehand. Also warn users with JS disabled using <noscript>

> “JavaScript doesn’t do my weird fetish” (e.g. type annotations)

Interesting that the author thinks type annotations are just a weird fetish.

I don’t read it that way at all, FWIW. I read it as using static types as an obvious example of language features which have been shoehorned onto JS because the language doesn’t provide a thing code authors strongly wish it did. I would read it the same way if the example had been JSX, and I quite like all of static types, TypeScript’s type system semantics specifically, and JSX as a general purpose way to define out of band DSLs.

It's an odd example for other reasons, given the context. It's situated in an essay that laments that performance and accessibility are underappreciated. The next thing the author says is, "Were I to guess, trying to break the gravity of platform limitations doesn't help with the physics-based limitations like batteries and electrons."

In reality, eschewing with overly dynamic language constructs and code patterns is how to make things friendlier to low-power (in both senses of the word) devices...

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-iiEDtpy6I>

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