Improve Your Page Performance With Lazy Loading : Comments
May 6, 2008
Comments
>> “…these so-called ‘thin clients’…”
Surely you mean ‘fat clients’? Traditional webapps were thin clients, but the very problem this article discusses is mitigating the widespread transfer of business logic from server to client – the fattening of client-side components.
I appreciated this article, Jakob. Thanks for a good explanation!
This is a bloat management solution, which I can also appreciate except that its result is to introduce more complexity and (as you rightly say, Jakob) more maintenance concerns, rather than encouraging people to design lean and clean from the start.
Developers too often are forced (or choose) to work on their own, instead of in teams. A javascript ace will create a lot of cool javascript widgets, some functions of which might be better handled another way.
To a man whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The same is true of any code wonk, and I’m not slamming anyone but we need to learn to develop functional workflows that put the right people on the right job in the first place. I see a lot of javascript-intensive sites since the advent of AJAX, and that’s not all good.
Event handlers (like the mouseover) are not inherently accessible. If there’s no fallback, there’s no function for a lot of people who may need it.
Henrah’s comment also rings true for me. It’s risky to push too much out to the client side, if only because of the unpredictability of bandwidth capacity, and this technique you’re writing about simply offers a method to minimize the effects of such bad practices. Many sites these days absolutely demand that the end user enable javascript; that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. Client-side scripts must always be optional, and provide a functional fallback. Progressive enhancement, etc. … I think you see where I’m going.
Thanks again, Jakob. Very thought-provoking. This is stuff we all need to think about more.
First off, thanks so much for sharing this method with us. Its something I knew was possible but never really understood the exact nature of how it could be put into practice.
Although I do wonder, as disclosed in the other comments, about the best scenario in which I would want to use this. In the web apps I’ve been creating recently, much more emphasis is placed on the server-side than the client-side, and justifiably so.
I definitely want to use this but am not sure, other than a web app loaded onto an external site such as a myspace app, when it would be justified.
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