Let's be clear ... I am not attacking jQuery here, just saying it is misuse to chuck it in the header and offering a practical mechanism to get out of a mess you create. I explain the cost of placing it in the header. I am not perfect, I make mistakes daily, I try to learn.
You pointed out a few best-practices, but it's a shame that this article is written in the context of jQuery, rather than recognizing that these "taxes" are true with every script tag you place on your website.
That is absolutely true, was looking at the cnn.com .. http://z.cdn.turner.com/cnn/tmpl_asset/static/intl_homepage/... which is in the header chews up 100k of compressed js. This monster must take upwards of 20ms to parse in chrome as well. Way worse in crappy browsers, the CDN network you need to support this is huge.
In defense of sloppily composed news websites: they're not run like normal sites. Despite the obvious benefit of optimizing and cleaning up the site markup, it's quite normal and it's even encouraged to sacrifice optimization -- so that something would just work.
Two main differences from normal sites are:
(1) The sheer size of moving parts: number of hands that have a say in the site's daily operation
Before anyone says "duh, well, get a handle on your site" you have to understand that news world is chaotic for the right reason: content flexibility and innovation. You can't put hundreds of ongoing creative and newsworthy projects on small development teams. That kind of open exploration belongs in hands of editors who specialize in their particular beats and are willing to pursue newsworthy projects (vendor or agency partnership, special reports, etc.)
These people only understand rudimentary HTML but they have access to be dangerous.
That's a good thing.
More people that do this sort of thing is good for any news agency: it gives us a collective chance for any random project to be naturally selected by audience for success. Problem is how to corral various implementations, bandaids, and so forth to where it all works flawlessly.
However, cutting off editors from being able to write markup is not the solution - and post-optimization regression testing is impossible due to sheer volume of content and creative projects. As long as something works within acceptable limits, it's fine.
(2) Politics of how technology intersects with editorial and operations.
There are invisible lines of power that outsiders don't see with news. Bureaucracy alone is tough to navigate, but, compartmentalization of editorial, technology, operations teams contributes to the problem. Most news agencies have been transformed over the decades (in some cases, centuries) and are pretty set in their ways.
Explosion of internet technology has dramatically sped up this transformation process and it'll take some time to iron out. Good news? Rise of devops in the news biz is happening.
Though I'm a fairly adept developer working for a news agency, I cannot update or fix our favicon file or optimize JS on the main page: for one, template control belongs to a different department that will prioritize their projects differently than I. Communication overhead is too large for small matters. In their defense, their lean team is supporting 50 languages, 1000-persons worth of editors and producers at this point.
Secondly, even if something is simple to fix and done for the right reasons, navigating this field of artificial obstructions just to reduce page weight or load time doesn't justify me taking time off from working on my latest editorial project: there is a fast approaching relevance deadline on it.
My laptop which could be a bit faster, the cold cache issue is the major issue though. Distributing a file this big in a scalable way without blocking requires a lot of servers.
"Stop Paying Your jQuery Tax", that's an attention grabbing title with an attack on a free open-source project. It took you at least 20m to write that post, probably over an hour. You can't just say "oops".
I (not really a frontend web developer, though I've done a little bit of it) immediately went "oh, script loading in HEAD?" before even opening the article.
Most people, at least in this neck of the woods, use jQuery. Most people also put it in the HEAD and are susceptible to this sort of thing. "jQuery tax" is a succinct way of describing the phenomenon, and nobody's going to suddenly think less of jQuery because of it.
1) If it took him a month to write that article, he could still say 'oops'. He's entitled to err.
2) It seems like you're the only one interpreting his post as an attack on jQuery. It isn't. You said in another thread that English isn't your first language. I'd suggest you temper your accusations in light of that knowledge.
3) Even if he were bashing jQuery, and even though it is a good and widely used framework, that's his right to do. Yes, it is your right to cry foul, as it is my right to attempt to set you straight.
Simply put, I think you're off the mark here. Your attack on him are more damning than his supposed attack on jQuery, and strikes me as defensive.
>You said in another thread that English isn't your first language. I'd suggest you temper your accusations in light of that knowledge.
As a native English speaker, I would like to point out that alecco is _correct_ when he interprets the article as slinging mud at jQuery; there is nothing wrong with his/her English vis-a-vis his interpretation of this article's title. The fact that you would tell him/her to pipe down because he's not a native speaker is disgusting and xenophobic. As a side note, your comment about alecco being "the only one" interpreting the post as attack on jQuery is completely false. S/he's dead on about it being what I call a DCA, or "deliberately contentious assertion", designed to win more page views than an article merits.
Honestly, if alecco were expressing an opinion with which you agreed, would you still be saying s/he 'just doesn't understand the article due to poor language skills'? Or do you reserve this treatment for those foreigners who dare disagree with you? The fact that you dug thru alecco's comments in other threads to find this ad-hominem rock to sling... the reason you had to mention his/her non-native speaking comment from another thread is because alecco's English is good enough that you wouldn't know s/he's a non-native speaker from this thread.
Non-English natives are allowed to have opinions at variance with your own, sir or madam. Leave
It wasn't meant to be an attack. The point was that I felt Alecco was being overly harsh, if not in this particular post, in others on that thread.
I didn't dig through their history for a rock to sling, but they mentioned it elsewhere in the same thread.
I don't have a dog in this fight regarding the article. It isn't an opinion I particularly agree or disagree with. I have no affiliation to the author, to the blog, or to any of the individuals I've remarked in this thread. I also like jQuery, so if anything, I'm arguing from the same bias as Alecco, in that I think it is a very high quality open source implementation of an amazing JS framework. I even read through the article multiple times to seek out the jQuery bashing Alecco alleges. I can't find it.
At first, I thought it was a popular opinion, until I realized that each of the remarks I believed to be overly negative were from the same person.
There wasn't any malice intended except to say "Hey, lighten up. People are allowed to make mistakes." One of the tenets I believe is core to Hacker News working is the assumption of good faith. I don't believe that Alecco was deliberately trying to malign the author, but the statements certainly come off as though they did not assume good faith.
I have tried to do so here, as in my original comment, but I do not believe you have extended me the same courtesy.
In the interest of promoting civility, I'll disregard your final remark, except to say that English is also not my first language.
