On 3 Jan 2022, at 6:44, Harriet Bazley wrote:
How are these images supposed to work?
https://www.phantomlibrary.com/macabre-mystery-curse-of-the-nightingal
First rule of the web: There's nothing you can't ruin with JavaScript.
Apparently, after loading 100s of K of JavaScript source code (at least it's < 1MB, small mercies!) that runs in your web browser using up your computer's resources, those smart developers at Wix realised - IDK - that the big thing causing slow loading times is images, because Reasons, maybe? Or they just wanted fancy loading transitions and hadn't heard of CSS. Whatever.
They built a very over-complicated JavaScript system, that uses a custom element wrapping a standard IMG tag in the hope that a browser will ignore the outer custom element but render whatever it wraps. So, the browser renders the standard img tag, which contains a low resolution blurred preview of the actual image. JavaScript code looks for the custom wix-image elements and parses parameters in the various data attributes to work out how it's supposed to load and show the full resolution image to the user.
One of the delightful side-quests is implementation of the "feature" wherein an image doesn't load until I scroll down to wherever it is showing on the page. I get to experience the joy of waiting for images to load over and over again, rather than the browser just loading them all when it fetches the page so that I can get on with viewing it without further delays or interruptions.
There is almost no universe in which this is better or faster than just letting the web browser load the original image directly, with the web site building providing a precise at-in-page-resolution copy of the image for the page and optionally a click-through to the full resolution version, if available and if permitted by the person who put the web site together.
-- TTFN, Andrew Hodgkinson Find photos, software, music and more at my home site, Bandcamp and GitHub: https://pond.org.uk / https://pondnz.bandcamp.com / https://github.com/pond
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