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Paolo Lulli
Paolo Lulli

Posted on • Edited on • Originally published at kevwe.com

On Sustainable Technology

The software world is peculiar in a number of ways.

Not so much about user than about who builds software.

There is plenty of alternatives to build things, and in general this is good, in that you're allowed to pick instruments that better suit you or the final result.

But sometimes it's not about fair alternatives.

There is hidden complexity, hidden costs for the adoption and - ultimately - hidden security challenges.

User fronting technologies are particularly affected by the "cool factor". Everyone want to look good, everyone has great time selling eye candy to the customers, but most of the time it is not entirely understood what that means.

We seem to care more about the external look of an application than what it really does with our data.

And the reality is: you want printed quality fonts of arbitrary family, single page application that do not reload the page, seamless experience on any screen size and ratio... you can get it, of course.
Just, this means you're bringing in telemetry from occult CDN 'freeware' providers.

You are violating user data, to the benefit of unknown third parties with those huge bundles that you force the users to download.
You are forcing a state onto the clients, that gets soon out of hand when things go wrong.

Good luck ringing a million users asking: "please refresh your local cache", will they really be happier like that?

It could be this is what you need, but again I think than in a very high percentage of cases all the user really need is a readable font, an accessible layout and websites that do not weigh more than 1M at the first access.

Everything more than that very quickly becomes just a sustainability issue.

For the weekly links: https://kevwe.com/weekly/202248

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