(no subject)

[torkell]

And today's winner for "we don't know how to stop writing Javascript" is tumblr, which fails at video in IE8.

No, this isn't because they're using the <video> tag from HTML5 (which would be a perfectly reasonable thing to do). This is because embedding video now requires an entire Javascript-based framework to create an IFRAME that then runs more Javascript that writes multiple <script> tags to load another Javascript framework that eventually writes an <object> tag to load a flash player that contacts a server-side API to determine where to load the flash video from.

I can't help but think that this must create more problems than it could ever hope to solve.

Comments

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

The site I help run as part of my dayjob suffers from huge spikes in traffic (not quite as bad as your average federal geoscience website suffers in a Mag 8.0 earthquake, but since such earthquakes don't happen in Australia, apparently Geoscience Australia get away with running their site on an android phone in sleep mode most of the time, with predictable results every time there's a Mag 3.0 earthquake. Sorry, I digress), and it just *has to keep working* because it serves out official forecasts and warnings and the like (and tells people when they need to take their washing off the line).

There are well understood mechanisms you use to make such a site reliable. Make everything static.

Don't lobby to become the first federal bureau to put paid advertising on their site. Don't then hire in an external contractor "with 10 years experience" who struggles with ssh key generation and only knows PHP. Sure, that .php file only accounts for about 1% of the traffic, but its commissioning seems to awfully well correlate with when the website started to go down when the traffic spikes, since it's loaded on every single pageload and is consequently by far the most hit asset on the website.

Especially don't make it a .php file when its content is entirely static, and/or the link could have been sent offsite to the advertising provider in the first place straight away.