Tales from the hospital

Breaking points

Essay

For the first couple of weeks I refused to join the hospital Wi-Fi, instead I relied on my phone’s data plan. The problem is, there are thousands of patients and personnel all connecting to the same set of cellular towers, which obviously puts a burden on the system.

What I got in terms of connection speed I would rank somewhere slightly below 3G. Videos on YouTube would load sometimes, depending on the time of day. All other videos did not, I got network errors, most likely due to improperly handled timeouts.

Videos aside, for the majority of websites to load in the first place, I had to be very patient. (Not a problem, I’ve been a patient after all. Get it? Sorry.)

Here’s what I got trying to access a repository on GitHub. The HTML did load, but no stylesheets nor any JavaScript had been applied.

My attempt to open the open-ui GitHub repository on a slow internet connection had essentially been a failure.

No stylesheets? Might as well use a text-based web browser.

Client-side rendering

How well a site fares also depends on the underlying technology. If you are lucky, the server already returns your requested content in the retrieved HTML.

On the other hand, if you have to wait for a large JavaScript file to get requested, downloaded, parsed, and executed, so that it then hopefully will fetch actual content, there’s a chance some step along the way won’t be successful, especially on a slow connection. As a result, you may be starring at a blank page indefinitely, usually without any information that something went wrong.

Put simply, I have a feeling that the “HTML” you got looks like this, courtesy of insert name of JavaScript framework:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
	<head><!-- … --></head>
	<body>
		<script src="/app.js"></script>
	</body>
</html>

Whenever that’s the case, someone did not do the progressive enhancement homework.

A call for lightweight websites

Don’t leave your site visitors empty-handed, do this instead:

  • Prioritize content.
  • Put emphasis on performance.
  • Fail gracefully.

I’ll keep this essay short, because I’m gonna hand over to Marijke Luttekes, who already wrote what needs to be said in her superb article »Why light-weight websites may one day save your life«.

I do not see as much talk about website performance and size as I would. Usually, the people talking about it are the artisans who care, or those who have been told by tools like Lighthouse that their stats are wrong.

On the upside, my own site performed well on said slow connection. Am I one of those artisans Marijke is talking about?