A related rant by John Gruber.
I've had bad experience with CSS and JS frameworks — all of the different modules and "state factories" make it very easy for me to lose my mind trying to put them together — so every webpage of mine is handcrafted. As long as those extra kilobytes don't have to stay for some spectacular effect, I fight for each of them. With all the buzz around Bootstrap and Angular, it seems a minority approach. You know how much the latest Bootstrap stylesheet weighs? 138.86 KB — minified. Wolfram Alpha tells me that over a typical 3G network, it would take about a second and a half to download that — just to create a sterilized, impersonal husk of a page. That's not counting the bundled JS file for advanced user interactions (47.75 KB, minified), or the therefore-necessary jQuery 3.x slim (67.97 KB, minified) and Popper.js, which is apparently necessary for popovers and whatnot (18.74 KB, minified). Together with the stylesheet, that's 273.32 KB of minified code. Guess how long it takes to download that. Up to 3.5 seconds. You're not going to use half of that bandwidth junk. Ever notice how, instead of advertising healthier food consumption, they advertise pills that are going to take care of your messed-up stomach? Bootstrap et al. are those pills, for the web. Convenience of production is one thing, Convenience of operation is completely different. Did you know you can replace jQuery out of Hubski entirely? You can even get sparklines with a special font.
Here's the thing for me as a web designer- the heaviest things in 99% of websites are never in the code, they're always in the images. Those extra 2mbs when someone in marketing forgets to resize the images add up, super fast. Why are kbs so important to web devs?
'cause usability and I care. It keeps surprising me how much further one can compress an image without visible loss of quality. Still, I keep image content to a minimum. Most of my pages contain none. Icons and SVGs. There's rarely a need for an image. Wish I could show you some to make it beyond empty boasting, but most of my stuff is in prototype stage or is made for fun and is never going to see the light of the day.Why are kbs so important to web devs?
Those extra 2mbs when someone in marketing forgets to resize the images add up, super fast.