Facebook’s Instant Articles platform has us web people discussing the speed at which our pages load. It is excellent to see this discussion happening.
Here are a few of my favorite tidbits from a few of the pieces I have read recently:
Mark Llobrera on A List Apart:
That’s my biggest takeaway from Instant Articles: we (designers and our clients) have to start tasting our work. Not just in our proverbial kitchen, but where our users actually eat the stuff.
Jeremy Keith on his blog:
There needs to be a cultural change in how we approach building for the web. Yes, some of the tools we choose are part of the problem, but the bigger problem is that performance still isn’t being recognised as the most important factor in how people feel about websites (and by extension, the web). This isn’t just a developer issue. It’s a design issue. It’s a UX issue. It’s a business issue. Performance is everybody’s collective responsibility.
Jeffery Zeldman on the A List Apart blog:
Soon, driven by fear that apps would make the web irrelevant, we began relying on frameworks that made even the simplest website act and feel like a mind-blowing application. Serving reams of code we didn’t need because, hell, it came with the frameworks, and abandoning principles like progressive enhancement because, hell, everybody uses JavaScript, we soon fell in love with high-resolution, full-screen background images, then fell even harder when those images quadrupled in weight thanks to Retina.
I’m as guilty as anyone. Perhaps even moreso since I work on a tool that allows people to edit web pages. However, this recent discussion has me rethinking and retooling. I’m excited to see the web get faster as a result of this push.
