Hmm, do we have an example?
We do. We even have an accompanying rant.
This meme was, uhm… inspired by Jamendo.
Great service. You can download Creative Commons music for the cost of creating an account there. That’s at least part of why it’s “Oh dear, oh dear. Gorgeous.”.But well, the button for downloading whole albums is broken.
So, what I’ve been doing, is to just open each song in a new tab, and then repeatedly click download → confirm → close tab.
And then by resizing the window, it’s even possible to align the download- and confirm-buttons, so it’s just double-click → Ctrl+W.But because of said loading screen, I have to remember to resize the window before I open all the tabs. Otherwise, I’ll get the loading screen every single time I’m put onto a new tab.
I’m guessing, it doesn’t use CSS to do the responsiveness, but rather it’s JavaScript that grabs the window dimensions and calculates how big everything has to be. But it doesn’t get told about the window having been resized until the tab is shown again, and because the JavaScript rendering is slow, you get this short loading screen every single time.
The JavaScript isn’t slow at rendering, it’s re-doing all the network requests. It re-loads parts of the page each time the layout changes.
To be fair, let’s not pretend we haven’t all written JS to resize shit in desperation when the CSS doesn’t work. Though the better way to do this would probably be to listen for the window size change to fire your style changing functions. That makes it behave more like responsive CSS that changes automatically when you resize the window (though with a slight lag sometimes because it’s a lot kore computationally expensive).
Well, the situation you describe, is probably best handled by CSS media queries.
In case you’re not familiar, you can write:
@media (width < 800px) { h1 { font-size: 110%; } }…to get smaller headings on mobile, for example.
But yeah, reality may be more ugly. Especially, if you’re using a bulky JS framework, it may be easier to do the JS dance.
“Meh, fuck it. Good enough. We’ll fix it in phase two.”
Yeah, maybe. My interpretation was that this webpage got implemented around a decade ago, when this was just how lots of webpages did responsive design, and it has only seen light maintenance ever since. But yeah, I’m also just spitballing…
“There is nothing more permanent than a temporary fix”
- Old African proverb
