Post #915327

2026-03-01 17:58 UTC

there’s many things which piss me off about modern web design practices but the worst one would be interfaces which show you a list or table of some small item and force you to look at this shit with pagination of like 50 items at a time and then you try clicking previous and next to actually find whatever it is that you’re looking for and pray to all gods that this thing isn’t too dumb to remember where it was and is going to just return some random items from the middle motherfuckers will pour megabytes worth of javascript down your pipe, but sending more than a few kilobytes worth of actual payload is too much bandwidth for them anyway this rant brought to you by my attempt of looking at a PR review on github and being stuck trying to figure out how to load more than 40 comments at once you know what is good at handling large amounts of text at a time? computers. you should try it sometime. it’s kinda amazing how much text you can fit in a few hundred megs of RAM.

Replies (5)

@jernej__s@infosec.exchange 2026-03-01 18:29

@mwk I'm constantly surprised at how bad webapps are at presenting raw text. Old school forums could be set up to present 100-500 posts per page, and browsers had no problems showing that, modern webapps will sometimes unload text the moment it leaves the viewport, making browser's built-in search unusable. 300 MB of frameworks can't handle a megabyte of text.

Open ##1731717
@technobaboo@ordinary.cafe 2026-03-01 18:39

@mwk they can make infinite scrolls for social media but basic tables are too hard????!?!?!???

Open ##1731718
@migratory@jorts.horse 2026-03-01 18:45

@mwk web devs are not responsible enough to be trusted with control of user experience

Open ##1731719
@ppxl@social.tchncs.de 2026-03-01 18:47

@mwk I feel this toot in my bones. Anyhow, my condolences with the GitHub UI

Open ##1731720
@foolishowl@social.coop 2026-03-01 20:47

@mwk I had to deal with incompatible word processor file formats in college, which meant when a word processor went off the market, the documents could no longer be read. And then I read about the SGML project, to make lightweight markup that was device independent, because this was a huge problem for government records. It had an exciting spinoff, HTML. A few years later, I was seeing "How to" guides on designing web sites that were all about how to subvert the design intention of HTML, and force web pages to be rendered as the designer intended, and then how you could design "entrance and exit tunnels" and otherwise control the way the user interacted with your website. It made me angry and it still does.

Open ##1731721