Very negative and condescending article in my view. Why would you spend time and money optimizing for a tiny percentage of users? Also they always underestimate the amount of power you gain by using frameworks like React and the amount of features and interactivity required when building modern web applications.
I'm not going to spend weeks hand coding some progressive enhancement in vanilla JS so some angry blogger can view my stuff in a console based browser with no JS.
It's like these people think that developer time is an infinite resource. Old woman yells at cloud indeed.
The article doesn't propose "optimizing" for users with some form of limitation (connectivity, device, personal disability). It proposes not excluding them by optimizing only for the maximal case.
Your point about hand coding progressive enhancement is well taken. What we need are tooling and frameworks that make such an approach feasible. The author laments that the frameworks du jour tend to start with (and incentivize building) the resource-heavy, complex, fragile version of a site / app.
>> Why would you spend time and money optimizing for a tiny percentage of users?
I also didn't like the tone of the article. And some arguments were pretty far fetched if you ask me. But this is actually a very valid point. Its not very hard to optimize websites for accessibility -- but its almost never a hard requirement except for government websites.
Oh and, one thing I found particularly interesting about this site:
Well, the page really loads in three requests, minus the images. It lazy-loads the images and player afterward (and drops them into the page without reflowing). It looks like the the images come in document order, too, so the visible part of the page is fully ready to view, images, included, before all the images load.
Something is a little screwy with the page though -- the main HTML page, which is 27K, takes two seconds. Some infrastructure somewhere could be running/configured better.
I think her point is that it's negative, dismissive, and ignorant of statistics to claim that we should ignore these things.
She brought up some extremely valid and common real-life cases for this:
• being in a foreign country
• being at a place with a shitty wi-fi connection
• that 30% of rural America is still dealing with 500kbps or lower internet
Basically, the ignorance to say 'I can't be bothered to take the time to optimize my web site' is literally basically what she's calling people out on. She's, from what I can see, stating that especially in a large organization - (she uses the example of an airline ticket site), the statistics behind this seem significant enough that depending on your number of users, their locations, and their activities, you could be looking at a significant number of users who could simply just ignore your web site or services because you couldn't be arsed to try to optimize your web images, or simply make the site work without having to display them. (Certainly not text-in-images, at the very least!)
I work as a senior iOS dev at one of the big banks in Canada on their iOS app. We won't stop supporting iOS 9 until that number falls under 2%. That still represents more than 10,000 active users for us. These 10k+ users rely on us for mobile banking, and we could lose them as customers if we don't support their devices, because some other bank will be happy enough to keep supporting it if we don't, and it just means more for clients for them.
The author clearly gave another example of this in the anecdote she presented about the individual who could not even log in to the airline's website at the airport itself, and ended up having to schedule a flight with a different company. They lost at least one customer there, and who knows how many more, all because they can't be arsed to check to see how the page behaves on a crummy connection, and optimize it thusly.
I remember living on a farm in rural Illinois, and the best internet we could get at the time was satellite. Which (or, worse, dial-up) is the only option for a lot of Americans, apparently.
Satellite internet, in particular, causes these poorly-optimized web sites with hundreds of tiny JS files and images to take forever to load on this type of connection, because Satellite internet works by pinging the satellite for every connection, meaning downloading a large file can be fast, but opening Facebook can take up to 3-4 minutes. (My ex-partner who still lives on that farm confirmed this for me today.)
In absolutely no way is this woman claiming 'developer time is an infinite resource.' In fact, I think she's saying 'dear developer, the web isn't about you.' It's about the users.
Plan your development for these kinds of cases to start, and you won't be spending 'infinite resources' on it, because it was always considered.
I'm not going to spend weeks hand coding some progressive enhancement in vanilla JS so some angry blogger can view my stuff in a console based browser with no JS.
It's like these people think that developer time is an infinite resource. Old woman yells at cloud indeed.