Lightweight

It’s been fascinating to see how television programmes have adapted to The Situation. It’s like there’s been a weird inversion with the YouTube asthetic. Instead of YouTubers doing their utmost to emulate the look of professional television, now everyone on professional television looks like a YouTuber.

No more lighting or audio technicians. No more studio audiences. Heck, no more studios.

There are some kinds of TV programmes that are showing the strain. A lot of comedy formats just fall flat without the usual production values. But a lot of programmes work just fine. In fact, some of them might be better. Watching Mary Beard present Front Row Late from her house is an absolute delight. It feels more direct and honest without the artiface of a television studio. It kind of makes you wonder whether expensive production costs are really necessary when what you really care about is the content.

All of this is one big belaboured metaphor for websites.

In times of crisis, informational websites sometimes offer a “lite” version. Max has even made an emergency website kit:

The site contains only the bare minimum - no webfonts, no tracking, no unnecessary images. The entire thing should fit in a single HTTP request. It’s basically just a small, ultra-lean blog focused on maximum resilience and accessibility. The Service Worker takes it a step further from there so if you’ve visited the site once, the information is still accessible even if you lose network coverage.

Eric emphasises the importance of performance in his post Get Static:

I’m thinking here of sites for places like health departments (and pretty much all government services), hospitals and clinics, utility services, food delivery and ordering, and I’m sure there are more that haven’t occurred to me.  As much as you possibly can, get it down to static HTML and CSS and maybe a tiny bit of enhancing JS, and pare away every byte you can.

Tom Loosemore offers this advice to teams building new coronavirus services:

1. Get a 4 year-old Android phone, and use it as your test/demo device.
2. https://design-system.service.gov.uk is your friend.
3. Full React isn’t your friend if it makes your service slow & inaccessible

Remember: This is for everyone.

Indeed, Gov.uk are usually a paragon of best practices in just about any situation. But they dropped the ball recently, as Matthew attests:

coronavirus.data.gov.uk is a static site, fetching and displaying remote data. It is also a 100% client-side JavaScript React site.

http://dracos.co.uk/made/coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ is 238K vs 770K (basics) on load. I’ve removed about 550K of JavaScript. It seems to work the same.

As Tom says:

One sign that your website isn’t meeting the needs of all your users is when Matthew Somerville gets sufficiently grumpy about it to do a proper version himself.

It’s true enough that Matthew excels at creating lightweight, accessible versions of services that are too bloated or buggy to use. His accessible Odeon project from back in the day is legendary. And I use his slimline version of the National Rail website all the time: traintimes.org.uk—it’s a terrificly performant progressive web app.

It’s thankless work though. It flies in the face of everything considered “modern” web development. (If you want to know the cost of “modern” framework-driven JavaScript-first web development, Tim has the numbers.) But Matthew is kind of a hero to me. I wish more developers would follow his example.

Maybe now, with this rush to make lightweight versions of valuable services, we might stop and reflect on whether we ever really needed all those added extras in the first place.

Hope springs eternal.

Update: Matthew has written about his process in Looking at coronavirus.data.gov.uk.

I’m more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I’ve built since | by Mike Hall | Jul, 2025 | Medium

I don’t normally link to articles on Medium—I respect you too much—and I do wish this were written on Mike Hall’s own site, but this is just too good not to share.

And don’t dismiss this as a nostalgiac case study from the past:

At no point did the constraints make the product feel compromised. Users on modern devices got a smooth experience and instant feedback, while those on older devices got fast, reliable functionality. Users on feature phones got the same core experience without the bells and whistles.

The constraints forced us to solve problems in ways we wouldn’t have considered otherwise. Without those constraints, we could have just thrown bytes at the problem, but with them every feature had to justify itself. Core functionality had to work everywhere, and without JavaScript crutches proper markup became essential.

This experience changed how I approach design problems. Constraints aren’t a straitjacket, keeping us from doing our best work; they are the foundation that makes innovation possible. When you have to work within severe limitations, you find elegant solutions that scale beyond those limitations.

Who’s Afraid of a Hard Page Load?

Why single-page apps are just not worth it:

Here’s the problem: your team almost certainly doesn’t have what it takes to out-engineer the browser. The browser will continuously improve the experience of plain HTML, at no cost to you, using a rendering engine that is orders of magnitude more efficient than JavaScript.

Meanwhile, the browser marches on, improving the UX of every website that uses basic HTML semantics. For instance: browsers often don’t repaint full pages anymore.

The State of ES5 on the Web

This is grim:

If you look at the data below on how popular websites today are actually transpiling and deploying their code to production, it turns out that most sites on the internet ship code that is transpiled to ES5, yet still doesn’t work in IE 11—meaning the transpiler and polyfill bloat is being downloaded by 100% of their users, but benefiting none of them.

What Is A Single-page Application?: HeydonWorks

You can’t create a complex modern web application like Google Mail without JavaScript and a SPA architecture. Google Mail is a webmail client and webmail clients existed some time before JavaScript became the language it is today or frameworks like Angular JS or Angular BS existed. However, you cannot create a complex modern web application like Google Mail without JavaScript. Google Mail itself offers a basic HTML version that works perfectly well without JavaScript of any form—let alone a 300KB bundle. But, still, you cannot create a complex modern web application like Google Mail without JavaScript. Just keep saying that. Keep repeating that line in perpetuity. Keep adding more and more JavaScript and calling it good.

JavaScript Bloat in 2024 @ tonsky.me

This really is a disgusting exlusionary state of affairs.

I hate to be judgy, but I honestly wonder how the people behind some of these decisions can call themselves web developers.