CHAPTER 3 The Vanilla Web Diet
of our clients have the same. That leads to beautiful and impressive web-
sites and showcases that clock up hundreds of server requests and several
megabytes of data.
When we go out and use our mobile devices, or the wireless connec-
tions available in cafés and hotels, things look different, though. A large
part of our time is spent watching spinning animations show us some-
thing is loading, and often we are told that the connection is wonky and
that we should try again. The same issue will come up for the next gener-
ation of online users. Remember how frustrating dial-up was? We must
not repeat the same mistake of adding lots of slick-looking content and
functionality while we develop just because we can. We must get leaner
and lose some of the fat.
As with any weight loss, just flexing our muscles and going to the gym
is not enough — we also need to analyze and change what we put into our
bodies. Our gym time right now concentrates on generating a new, more
professional workflow for the Web. Instead of writing CSS, HTML and
JavaScript, we use build processes and scripts like Grunt, we preprocess our
CSS with Sass and LESS, and we automatically generate image sprites from
many images in a folder. Many people also proclaim the only way we’ll ever
be flexible enough to build ‘real apps’ is to move to other, new languages
like Dart and TypeScript and apply more software engineering, computer
science and pattern-driven approaches to the Web. This reminds me of the
time when JavaScript libraries were all the rage and made browsers behave
predictably. Of the hundreds of libraries created back then, only a few remain
now and we can easily predict that many of the so-called “essential tools” we
create and rely on now will become unfashionable and outdated.
Maybe we should also take a break in our drive to be cool and new and
innovative the whole time, simply for the sake of being so, and check what
we are doing — analyze our eating habits, so to say. I call this the Vanilla
Web Diet, much like people have started to call using JavaScript without
libraries vanilla JavaScript. I want to share some ideas and thoughts you
can bear in mind to help slim down an existing website or your next app.