
It's 2012, HTML5 is awesome, and I'm surfing a PDF - tbassetto
http://stephanierieger.com/its-about-the-content-stupid/
======
ekidd
This isn't a problem with HTML 5, it's a problem with the Camper site itself.

The Chrome developer tools show _202_ HTTP requests, including tons of tiny
images, and many non-minified JavaScript files. And there's only about 500k of
data, so it's not really a bandwidth problem unless you're on an EDGE
connection or something horrible like that.

The big bottlenecks here are round-trip latency and the maximum number of
parallel requests made by the browser—if a round trip ping takes 250ms, and
you can make 6 requests at a time, then it will take you a minimum of 8.4
seconds to load the page, no matter how big your pipe.

For the sake of comparison, the main Hacker News page takes 6 HTTP requests to
load. A Google search results page takes 22.

Camper could fix their site by tiling all their little PNGs into a couple of
large PNGs, and merging all their JS into a single file. If they got their
file count under 25, they'd load quite quickly.

~~~
heliodor
Yes, the site itself is immediately at fault, but the author used it as an
example of her point, which is that the web in its current state is pathetic.

There are plenty of little things that can make a website faster: image
sprites, minified js, etc. Why don't the tools we use automatically handle
this?

Why are we so focused on creativity and customization instead of
standardization and ease of building? Look at the waves of designers who are
crying foul over Twitter Bootstrap and trying to convince us not to use it
because they realize that the demand for their services has just been cut in
half!

Why are there no tools that provide the myriad of widgets we roll by hand each
time? Lists, sliders, progress bars, drop-downs, calendars, etc. Well, there
are. There's GWT, there clones of it for python, there's Wicket, and more. But
few people seem to use them.

There's more that can be added here, but the point is the web needs much
better tools, processes, standardization, and ease of programming.

We're giving people the tools to make the web a bad experience and in general
that's been the end result, though we try to avoid those websites.

~~~
mgkimsal
_Why are we so focused on creativity and customization instead of
standardization and ease of building? Look at the waves of designers who are
crying foul over Twitter Bootstrap and trying to convince us not to use it
because they realize that the demand for their services has just been cut in
half!_

Well, what 'we' are you talking about? As someone who's primarily a back-end
developer with some 'front-end' skills (but not necessarily design skills),
I'm not at all focused on customization or creativity. Bootstrap has been
fantastic, because it allows me to make _decent looking_ sites out of the box.

If/when a project gets to the point where a) it's out of proof of concept and
b) the client/team wants better visuals, then we'll bring in a designer or
two, and press them to design something around the existing CSS/structure
that's there (within reason).

This will piss off the UX people to no end, and in some cases, they may be
right to get upset. One size does not fit all, and Bootstrap in its current
form doesn't handle every situation elegantly.

What I hope to see is an evolution of Bootstrap and some similar tools crop up
to address these UX/UI needs from the perspective of a web 'person' - not a
designer, not a developer, but a hybrid role. A role that both understands and
implements all facets of the technology (not just advises/consults, but can
actually be hands on), and a role with a primary focus on the hands-on. Not
photoshop/dreamweaver on one hand, and not GWT/abstractionkits on the other.

That role doesn't quite exist yet, because the tools aren't quite there yet,
but as tools like Bootstrap evolve, I think we'll see this. There should be no
need to 'mockup' stuff first in Photoshop _if_ the only (or primary) end
result is web, but that's still how many projects work.

------
smoyer
I have a good Internet connection into my home here in the United States (I
telecommute from a home office) but I also have 4 kids. The older two have
graduated to streaming video to their laptops, but the younger two still
prefer choosing titles from Netflix.

When they're all streaming video, I find have the exact same problem on a
desktop with plenty of resources. I think Stephanie's message should be
applied several ways. We should degrade gently for underpowered devices like
phones, but we should also be cognizant of the network capacity of the user.

Coming from the embedded systems world, I know what it is to count every clock
cycle and every byte of RAM. I need to remember those techniques when I'm
designing and implementing web applications. Thanks Stephanie!

~~~
koide
Yes, Google Maps interface comes to mind every time I get reminded about this
issue: "Still loading? Use the basic HTML version or click here for help"

Although I wonder if this really is the best solution.

Problems:

User has to explicitly select a change.

Once you change it might go faster, but it's no guarantee and makes you wait a
longer total time to get to the first complete view.

Benefits:

It does not depend on directly measuring bandwidth (wasteful and still would
take longer)

Relays information about the problem to the user and not just a bad
experience.

Although, short of dynamic loading of less intensive interfaces until it ends
up rendering a "basic HTML" view, I fail to see one. I haven't seen this
implemented though.

------
Cogito
I agree with her. I don't go to most sites to have some 'experience', rather I
am there to find certain pieces of information or to use a service. Any
technology that hinders me in the pursuit of that purpose, flash intro videos
being the typical example, is frustrating and annoying. If the technology is
super cool I might play with it for a while, but in the end I am skipping
through trying to find what I came for originally.

This particular example annoyed me - I found it glitchy and there was no
compelling reason for me to want to look at it. I had no reason to visit the
site in the first place, so perhaps my opinion is not that important.

On the other hand, the designers may have done lots of testing, and determined
that this design is the one which results in the most sales (or whatever). In
any case, technology should never be a substitute for good user experience,
not even flashy html5.

~~~
isnotchicago
This is the most important point: what is the site trying to accomplish? Or
better, what are users trying to accomplish with the site? Presumably, the
site is trying to sell shoes, and creating an "experience" around those sales
might be crucial for Camper. On the other hand, such an experience may be (as
in this case) an impediment.

As others have mentioned, the trick is using tools appropriately. But first
you need to know for what use cases you are designing.

------
MatthewPhillips
I know this will never happen, but how great would it be if we saw a revival
of Gopher for this very reason? HTML is clearly going to be for applications
in the future, so Gopher could fill in the hole of "just show me the content".
Again, won't happen. But I can dream. If only there were a 0-click way to
convert a html site to a gophermap/text files.

~~~
runn1ng
People don't want to just "see the content".

If you want that, you can just fire up links/elinks/lynx; it, surprisingly,
works fairly well even today.

But even the writer of the article didn't want to just see the text - she
wants to see the shoes and decide which one to buy. You don't want to see a
table with shoes numbers, descriptions and prices when you are shopping;
visuals are important, too.

That's why noone is actually using text-only browsers.

~~~
glesica
She wanted to "see the content". The "content" just included images as well as
text. What she didn't want was the heavy interface.

Maybe a new content type would work... "text/html" would be the application
and "text/static-html" would be "just the content"? Browsers would then just
have a toggle option of some sort.

~~~
terangdom
What about XML for content and XSLT for display? User could use a variety of
XSLTs depending on constraints, viewing conditions.

~~~
effigies
The issue isn't what format the content is in, but that it's retrieved through
client-side logic rather than as part of the query response.

Also, what's wrong with HTML/CSS that is in any way resolved by XML/XSLT? I'm
genuinely curious why somebody would put their content into a format with no
default, well-understood display semantics.

~~~
terangdom
Maybe I misunderstood how the xml/xslt-paradigm works, but my idea was that
you have a serverside api serving up raw data, and the display is controlled
by some code on the clientside that can be easily customised. So the server
could serve up something like <shoe> <images> <image>foo.com/x.jpg</image>
<image>foo.com/y.jpg</image> </images> <description>This shoe is very advanced
bla bla bla</description>
<fancyintroanimation>foo.com/intro1.swf</fancyintroanimation> </shoe> <shoe>
....

and the client could use the default xslt if they were happy with that, and a
custom otherwise.

------
avirambm
Website is down, cache is available here:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fstephanierieger.com%2Fits-
about-the-content-stupid%2F)

------
padolsey
I think the real issue here is a lack of graceful degradation on the Camper
website. Built the right way, their fancy paper.js presentation thing would
source whatever content it needs from within the page itself. The only excuse
is laziness coupled with an unhealthy infatuation with new shiny technologies.
I guess there are some bored people behind this who think anything, even a
shoe catalogue, can be revolutionised. And that's fine, but they forgot about
the core fundamentals of the web -- the kind I can rely on when loading up
lynx and firing off a GET request to see some ... content.

~~~
AndrewDucker
Degradation wouldn't help here - her browser can cope, it just takes an age to
download the contents of the web page over a slow link.

~~~
padolsey
To see a "degraded" view though, I would just disable JS. Isn't this viable?

~~~
virmundi
Probably not. It is often the case that a site is built entirely (read
meaningfully) in JS. If one wanted to degrade gracefully without JS, one would
have to have two sites: JS and Plain-Old-HTML. Now this is not possible,
especially for a startup. You have a set number of resources. DRY helps
allocate them. If you violate DRY with 2 sites, you're focus is going to be
lost.

Now some might say that good web design was violated by make the site
dependant on JS. However, as the title shows, this is 2012. My cellphone has
the ability to render most JS effectively. The old adage about degrading JS is
just that, old. It was in a day before ECMA Script was sanctioned or common on
the browsers. It was before jQuery and the like unified the browsers.

tl;dr: JS is ubiquitous and is what the front end, and even the whole app is
built on.

------
gyaresu
Irony alert: Database overload for an article on lightweight websites.

~~~
objclxt
I also find it odd that the masthead for the blog is a 737KB PNG...I don't
know why you wouldn't use a JPG - at a high quality level it's virtually
indistinguishable and 1/4 of the size.

It's a little pedantic, but if you're going to talk about how sites should be
lightweight and then use a sizeable PNG image you're sort of opening yourself
up for criticism.

~~~
jarofgreen
She's tweeted saying that was a mistake and she'll fix it.

~~~
josefresco
A good lesson though to remember before calling someone out publicly. We all
make mistakes, and the author is not exempt from this rule.

~~~
unalone
Yeah, but she's a blogger and Camper is a company worth millions of dollars.

I don't expect good design from bloggers. If they say smart things, I'll read.
I expect good design from people who theoretically want my money, because it's
their job not to irritate me when I'm trying to pay them.

I've avoided buying products from companies who make terrible design
decisions. Not even to punish them, just to avoid having to deal with the pre-
product bullshit.

------
dlokshin
HTML5 and "fast" aren't mutually exclusive. Plenty of examples where HTML5
mobile sites are plenty fast over 3G like Quora and Asana (just two that I use
often).

~~~
leviathan
I don't know what you mean by "fast over 3G" but over here 3G is faster than
any available ADSL plan you can get. I sometimes tether to my phone to
download some contents when I'm in a hurry. I'm guessing the article is
talking about sub-256kbps wifi.

~~~
pajju
3G is never meant for Live Traffic. There are latency issues and packet losses
being wireless. There is no proper QOS guarantees on top of the Wireless
Stack.

So never expect good skype experience or any real-time services like - Live
search on 3G networks.

------
koide
It's 2012, and I'm using a lousy hotel wi-fi shared by 503 guests that takes
me back to 1997 connection speeds.

No wonder PDF is the solution. Sure, sites should be optimized to the fullest
extent possible and probably even detect connection speeds and offer a low
bandwidth version (are there libraries for this already?) when appropriate;
but that's a huge amount of work (and money) for what basically are outliers
(I wouldn't expect many people to browse the Campers site from a lousy wi-fi
in Bangkok)

~~~
joliveira
I am on unshared 12Mbps ADSL, not the fastest around but surely faster than
1997 connection speeds and my experience was similar. Around 20 seconds for
the initial loading and 5-10 for each collection. I am glad I wasn't actually
looking to buy shoes and just checking the times the content took to load so I
wouldn't say this design example is a problem just for the outliers.

~~~
koide
That wasn't my experience. It would be interesting to arrive at the bottom of
the problem. I take it I'm being served a different page than you are, maybe
due to location (I'm not on the US, but then, neither was the article author)

------
ereckers
To be fair, the blogger is pointing to the Camper website "Lookbook" which in
this industry is more of a "vanity" type display. It's meant to be a little
creative and in this case it's extremely creative and extremely heavy.

If the author of the blog just wants to look at some shoes, then the Camper
website catalog is probably where she wants to be:

<http://www.camper.com/en/eshop/productos.xhtml?type=W>

I'm confident that if you looked at the Camper website daily visits a majority
of browsing/shopping (90%+) will be taking place through the Catalog and not
through the Lookbook.

If you take a minute to view the homepage HTML you'll notice that there is
only 2 links through to the Lookbook and that is only accessible after hitting
the arrow down / MENU menu item and then clicking through the SHOES menu and
submenu items (which itself is a pretty unintuitive element).

The author brings up some good points about the Lookbook, but we shouldn't
pretend that the website is using it as its main interface to the products.

------
codeka
I don't know if the camper website is differentiated by region, or if I'm
looking at a totally different website (<http://www.camper.com> ?) but I'm not
seeing what she's seeing at all. I see a pretty standard e-commerce website
with no "loadings" at all.

It's pretty image-heavy, for sure, but that's to be expected when how else are
you supposed to look at shoes?

~~~
phylofx
I see what she is seeing. <http://www.camper.com/en/lookbook>

~~~
chris_wot
The slowness has nothing to do with connection speed! I'm on blazingly fast
Optusnet Cable Internet in Australia, and it's still incredibly slow on my
(fairly recent) Asus laptop.

------
simonbrown
> I saw some nice shoes today at the mall and want to know if they’re
> available back home (because i’ve learned from experience that region-
> blocking also applies to shoes).

Region blocking applies to shoes?

------
danenania
There's really no reason for that camper app to load so slowly. Rendering the
initial screen then loading additional assets in the background with a
prioritized queue could probably cut the load time by 90%.

~~~
dwc
_> There's really no reason..._

Well, no. Of course not. It's not at all about the technical feasibility, or
even the ease, of delivering content up front. The web first began with the
ability to deliver content up front and it's remained a viable option all
long.

The continuing problem is that people (CEOs, designers, developers, et al) get
sidetracked and forget what their site is supposed to be doing. They forget
what their customers or prospective customers actually want to do: get
information; use a service; buy stuff.

------
munimkazia
It's 2012. Start caching your database queries!

(Looks like the website's database connection has maxed out)

------
chucknelson
The Camper site is, like many other sites on the web, a bit over-produced. I
would much rather have a clear layout and fast loading product pages than a
fancy animated-just-for-kicks "experience" that starts to annoy after the
first 30 seconds.

------
TomGullen
It's never a problem with the technology, it's a problem of misuse of the
technology and bad design.

------
bambax
For some reason I thought this would be about PDF parsing on the client --
actually it's just somebody complaining that some eCommerce site takes so long
to load that it's faster to download and read their PDF brochure offline.

Who cares?

~~~
andybak
I care. I make websites and this article made me think some more about page
weight vs other trade-offs.

I'm not sure what your comment has added to the debate.

~~~
bambax
> I'm not sure what your comment has added to the debate.

You're entitled to your opinion. But if your job is to make websites you
shouldn't need a random post on a random blog to think about page weight...?

~~~
andybak
Sigh. Of course I think about page weight and a 100 other aspects of my craft.
Listening to other people's thoughts is valuable in weighing up all the
different priorities that compete for my attention.

------
robmcm
It's like flash websites all over again, bring back HTML4!!!!

~~~
dlitz
I think the Camper website needs more animated GIFs, Javascript image
rollovers, MIDI music, and a tiled background.

------
rapind
So let me get this straight. You're interested $100+ shoes but prefer
substance and functionality over style only when it comes to the website that
sells them?

~~~
RyanMcGreal
I only buy $100+ shoes. High quality shoes are so much more comfortable and
long-lasting than their cheaper counterparts that their performance and
usefulness more than makes up for the higher cost.

~~~
rapind
I only buy < $40 shoes and I've bought maybe 2 pairs in the last 4 years. High
quality shoes are definitely more comfortable and long-lasting, however high
price != high quality, even if the marketing and branding says so.

You buy $100 shoes because of style and brand. And this price tag does not
always mean quality. There are plenty of expensive brands that fall apart
under everyday usage.

~~~
manmal
I bought some Vibrams some weeks ago (> $100) and they are the best shoes I
ever had, a small change of lifestyle. Don't overgeneralize on that, the topic
"shoes" is very broad, as is "education".

~~~
effigies
I got some Vibrams around Christmas and have been wearing them solidly for
about 2-2.5 months (since the weather warmed up). The harder layer of rubber
has already worn through on the heel, exposing the softer layer. I'm not so
sure I'll be getting another pair.

~~~
manmal
You might consider changing your walking style. Children most often walk
middle-footed or even forefooted when barefoot, and this is considered the
most natural way of moving. Setting down the rear end of the foot before
lowering it completely is a necessity when wearing normal shoes, but it's not
natural. Before I adapted fully to the Vibrams my soles even started burning
on the heels when I ran longer distances. I read that it's best to just set
down the whole foot plainly (or forefoot first) when walking/running with Vs.

------
kylebrown
snarky blogger underwhelmed by website after patiently waiting thru load
screen. news at 11

------
halayli
I ended up buying a camper shoes.

------
h84ru3a
It's web developers that are responsible.

It's a little like advertising perhaps. Advertising has become more of an art
form than a tool. Awards given for achievement in creating ads are based on
the perceived artistic value of an ad, not on its market effectiveness.

Web development is viewed as an art form by web developers. The web is not a
tool to them. It's a canvas.

But the reality is that for many users in many cases, the web is a tool. They
just want to accomplish some task, and they are not going to pay attention to
artistic value.

Maybe a good example is Amazon. Many web developers criticise the site's
design. But Amazon is doing just fine. Because users do not visit Amazon for
an "experience". They visit it to buy things.

Maybe there should be two versions of every website: 1. an artisitic one aimed
at "user experience" where the developer could display their design skills and
2. another aimed at getting some task(s) done, quickly and efficiently. The
latter might follow some universal standard. No thinking involved in its
"design", just following a spec.

The user could choose. The problem for the author of this blog post was she
had no choice.

~~~
Domenic_S
> It's web developers that are responsible.

No way. It's _marketing_ people who are responsible. Obvious example:
<http://www.dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html>

At the level that Camper (or Amazon) is operating on, the marketing department
holds all the cards when it comes to the web site. The web devs mostly decide
how to implement, but they're operating at the behest of marketing.

~~~
h84ru3a
In general, do marketing people know how to create websites?

If not, how can they even know what is possible to create using HTML, CSS,
etc.?

If the answer is "they look at what the competition is doing," then how did
the marketers at the competitor know what is possible?

It has to start somewhere. Who was behind the web back in 1993? Marketing
departments? Are marketers the ones who know what can be done with HTML, etc.,
and what cannot?

If a marketing department asks a web developer to implement something that the
developer knows will be an annoyance to end users, and then he decides to tell
them it is not possible, does the marketing department not accept this answer?
"Look, we know how to make websites, we know this can be done and we'd do it
ourselves if we had the time, but we're busy doing marketing. Either you do
your job and build this site as we ask, or we'll find someone else."

So, at some stage, some web developer somewhere makes a decision.

I remember reading the confession of a talented developer who wrote, using
mini scheme, stealth malware to serve pop-ups. His skills were so good that he
could disable all competing malware; the competition was helpless. The NY
Attorney General later shut down his employer on consumer protection grounds.
The developer was not typically an author of malware, and knew what he was
doing was wrong, but his excuse for working with this outfit was that he
needed a job.

Without that developer making a choice, the malware company would never have
known it was possible to do what they were able to do with the help of this
particular talented developer. The use of mini scheme, self modifying code and
disabling all competing malware were not in his "job description". He showed
them what was possible. And surely they loved him for it. But how about the
users infected with the malware, who had to see his employer's pop-ups every
day with no way to "turn it off"? What would they think of his work?

Just something to think about.

~~~
Domenic_S
> how can they even know what is possible to create using HTML, CSS, etc.?

Anything is possible. It doesn't mean a particular idea is good (see: the
topic website), but anything is certainly possible.

> It has to start somewhere. Who was behind the web back in 1993? Marketing
> departments?

For big companies? Yes.

> Are marketers the ones who know what can be done with HTML, etc., and what
> cannot?

Implementation is beside the point. Even if the Camper "experience" in the
original link loaded quickly and was implemented perfectly, it would be bad.

> If a marketing department asks a web developer to implement something that
> the developer knows will be an annoyance to end users, and then he decides
> to tell them it is not possible, does the marketing department not accept
> this answer?

This is the difference between a good marketing department and a bad one. The
good ones will take the feedback and the bad ones won't. It's also the
difference between a good organization and a bad one -- if the org makes it a
habit not to talk to engineers until the idea has gone through revision after
revision, UX, etc, then there's too much inertia to overcome (say, 3 months of
designing, UX development, intended to be launched in tandem with a meatspace
campaign, as an example).

For giant companies, the web site is a piece of their action, and often times
not the largest piece. The web team (the ones who implement) are pinned to the
timelines of other rollouts (in-store campaigns, billboards, magazine ads, tv
ads, and so forth). So while a certain idea might not be best, there may not
be time to change it -- or (consider this) the web experience might not be the
most important to a company that does 80% of their volume in meatspace.

Thinking that the web site & web team should be the gatekeepers of customer
experience in a multichannel business that isn't focused online is a myopic
view. In spirit I'm right there with you dude, but in practice (can you tell
I've worked at giant companies?) it doesn't work that way.

~~~
h84ru3a
If you're with me in spirit, I take that to mean I'm not "wrong", I'm just
unrealistic, a dreamer, etc.

I think web developers have a lot of power over how the web operates. Much
more than marketing departments.

In the spirit of making money, I'm right there with you. Web developers have
to eat.

But to think the matter of the web's usability, or unusability (what the blog
post described), is out of their hands, and solely in the hands of marketing
departments, I don't buy it. Marketing has the budget, they do not have the
skills, or even the knowledge.

I see numerous examples year after year that show that both large and small
companies do not have the first clue how stuff works or what the implications
are on end users. Developers present them with a proposition and the company
writes a check. When some egregious practice comes to the attention of the
press, the companies often have no idea what they were even paying for -- they
do not understand what was being done.

One need only look at SEO and the types of websites it produces. It's quite a
stretch to try to hold marketing departments responsible for this state of
affairs.

------
89a
Anyone else noticed how unbearable Javascript has made the internet on older
browsers?

Google on an iPhone 3G is utter pain

Any Tiger PowerPC Mac is utterly painful because browser JS engines have got
so much better that we throw way too much for older browsers to cope with at
them.

~~~
Domenic_S
Should we get off your lawn, too? ;)

------
CubicleNinjas
I like the idea of a world that dynamically responds to you better.

Are you on a speedy networked desktop? You get the bells and whistles version.
Are you own a tablet with less bandwidth? We note this, and load the
appropriate version. Are you on a mobile phone on the move? We load the mobile
edition which is about efficiency and speed. The user doesn't need to make
decisions, but the site architect should be seamlessly making them behind the
scenes.

Also, I'd love it so all versions to have the same content, optimized for all
homes. If I visit another mobile/tablet site that reduces content for "my
convenience" I will start punching web developers. :)

------
Devilboy
Maybe if Stephanie's site was lighter weight it'd still be up and running :P

