This is a brilliant initiative. I think that less is more. Recently I was trying to inspect Twitter/X to obtain a video. You would not believe how many nested 'div' elements it was buried under.
I also had to do a X icon to replace the Twitter bird. So I went to get the official one and make it into my lean SVG. Again, you would not believe how much bloat was in what should have been a very simple file.
This is no rant about Twitter, the web in general is 99% bloat. I don't believe Google have 'stewarded' the web well enough to keep it lean.
If we go with the icon example, an icon has to be simple or else it is not an icon. Yet we have huge icon sets as fonts with excessive bloat. This is why I end up having to hand-carve SVG assets on the regular.
This aspect of simplicity applies to web pages too. Style sheets should not be thousands of lines. Content does not need to be nested in a billion divs, particularly since no div elements are needed now we have content sectioning elements and CSS grid layout.
The leanness of a website should be important as an expression of brand values for companies. For example, if your business is making cars, your website should be the fastest loading one to reflect your 0-60 times.
Hopefully we will get metrics for efficiency as one of things like accessibility that people strive for in varying degrees, with this efficiency being good for SEO. As it is, Google prefer data to be poorly structured as wading through rubbish is what their business depends on. If all content was well organised without the bloat then others would be able to do search to compete with Google. Hence we have a sea of divs on every web page, even though MDN docs says the div element is the element of last resort.
Twitter regularly changes the location of source videos because as X they now charge for the ability to download them directly. I've also noticed on iOS, if you attempt to screen record a video the app essentially crashes or glitches the video player.
As with many things, the solution is ffmpeg. After I got that upsell thing when I tried to download a video about a week ago, I found the correct ffmpeg incantation, mostly out of spite for Twitter. If you find the m3u8 request in devtools on a tweet, you can use something like the following:
I also had to do a X icon to replace the Twitter bird. So I went to get the official one and make it into my lean SVG. Again, you would not believe how much bloat was in what should have been a very simple file.
This is no rant about Twitter, the web in general is 99% bloat. I don't believe Google have 'stewarded' the web well enough to keep it lean.
If we go with the icon example, an icon has to be simple or else it is not an icon. Yet we have huge icon sets as fonts with excessive bloat. This is why I end up having to hand-carve SVG assets on the regular.
This aspect of simplicity applies to web pages too. Style sheets should not be thousands of lines. Content does not need to be nested in a billion divs, particularly since no div elements are needed now we have content sectioning elements and CSS grid layout.
The leanness of a website should be important as an expression of brand values for companies. For example, if your business is making cars, your website should be the fastest loading one to reflect your 0-60 times.
Hopefully we will get metrics for efficiency as one of things like accessibility that people strive for in varying degrees, with this efficiency being good for SEO. As it is, Google prefer data to be poorly structured as wading through rubbish is what their business depends on. If all content was well organised without the bloat then others would be able to do search to compete with Google. Hence we have a sea of divs on every web page, even though MDN docs says the div element is the element of last resort.