Aug. 13, 2012 at 10:33pm with 12 notes
Reblogged from c1qfxugcgy0
Grids, themes.

c1qfxugcgy0:

  1. Grid layouts are “unnatural”— they don’t work well with the “DOM tree” metaphor HTML+CSS uses, so you have to align everything with Javascript. Cargo does that with some fairly heavyweight code, considering that its only job is to “line up images”: four files, 82.91kb, incl. the entire JQuery Javascript framework. On my two year old laptop, it took 3.3 seconds to load and render, for a page that’s ten thumbnails and some text! Webperf nerds hate and fear Javascript, this is why.
  2. It depends on Javascript. If your user-agent doesn’t execute Javascript, like the two million people who use NoScript, web browsers used by blind people, and perhaps most significantly, Google’s web indexer, then they won’t see anything.
  3. It’s written in a fairly archaic style. Since 2010, the big thing in CSS has been responsive design, giving the browser exactly what they need. Small screens get small images, big screens get big images. This is slightly more complicated than you would expect, since layouts don’t scale at all: a 10x10 grid of thumbnails might look fine at 1920x1080, but be lost in a sea of whitespace at 2880x1800, and be completely unreadable on a cellphone, where a 10x10 grid can result in thumbnails that are sixteen by sixteen pixels each.

    It doesn’t look great on my weirdo clowncar monitor either.


    Some good examples of responsive design is Justin Ouellette’s theme, (which costs money) and to a lesser extent, mine. (which doesn’t)
  4. There’s some UI problems. Grid themes usually don’t have timestamps, and the layout breaks the “older posts are lower down on the page” convention; which makes it hard to tell how often a person posts, which is the second most important piece of information you need when you’re considering following someone. (“Do they post dumb shit, and do they post dumb shit all the time?”)
  5. A nebulous, hornrimmed-glasses criticism: Are thumbnails even necessary in the year 2012? Monitors are big, internet connections are fast. (For modern desktop computers, ignoring the hundreds of millions of cell phones and old computers out there— this is where responsive design comes in, again) A greenfield design, written today, would just put all the images, at moderate resolution (800xN) on one big page, without the premature optimization of thumbnails. Thumbnails are important if you’re Amazon, and serving ten zillion product images a day; but perhaps less important if you’re displaying art. You want people to see your stuff! More importantly, you don’t want to make it hard for people to see your stuff!
  1. plaidfluff reblogged this from heysawbones and added:
    back when I gave a shit about this kind of thing I tended to just make all my boxes a uniform width (or maybe a...
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