Comments on: JavaScript Badges And Widgets Considered Harmful? http://robert.accettura.com/blog/2007/02/12/javascript-badges-and-widgets-considered-harmful/ Robert Accettura's Personal Blog on Web Development and Tech Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:35:22 -0400 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Wladimir Palant http://robert.accettura.com/blog/2007/02/12/javascript-badges-and-widgets-considered-harmful/comment-page-1/#comment-119842 Wladimir Palant Tue, 13 Feb 2007 17:39:12 +0000 http://robert.accettura.com/archives/2007/02/12/javascript-badges-and-widgets-considered-harmful/#comment-119842 Robert, there are almost no HTTP/1.0 servers out there so the relevant pref is network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server - 2 connections per server. And that is more than enough in almost every case. A typical blog has no frames, only a few scripts and stylesheets, less than 10 images. If you try to use more connections the time to create those connections will eat all the advantage you get from it (not even counting additional server name lookups or server-side overhead). Now if you insert third-party content on the server side you won't get much impact on page load times because it is mostly HTML code that can be easily cached and compressed. You don't need to give up neither server-side caching (caching parts of the page separately isn't a big deal) nor client-side caching. JavaScript widgets are different, they usually inhibit caching and are sent uncompressed (Netscape 4 compatibility?). Also note that they delay parsing of the page which has a very bad impact on *perceived* page load times. My conclusion is: these JavaScript widgets are in fact very bad (in particular the security implications). Unfortunately stating this won't make them go away, as you correctly noted neither content providers nor the majority of bloggers will make an effort to change anything. For my part I don't use any external scripts on my site even though I use third-party content on a few occasions - it is fetched on the server-side. Robert, there are almost no HTTP/1.0 servers out there so the relevant pref is network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server – 2 connections per server. And that is more than enough in almost every case. A typical blog has no frames, only a few scripts and stylesheets, less than 10 images. If you try to use more connections the time to create those connections will eat all the advantage you get from it (not even counting additional server name lookups or server-side overhead).

Now if you insert third-party content on the server side you won’t get much impact on page load times because it is mostly HTML code that can be easily cached and compressed. You don’t need to give up neither server-side caching (caching parts of the page separately isn’t a big deal) nor client-side caching. JavaScript widgets are different, they usually inhibit caching and are sent uncompressed (Netscape 4 compatibility?). Also note that they delay parsing of the page which has a very bad impact on *perceived* page load times.

My conclusion is: these JavaScript widgets are in fact very bad (in particular the security implications). Unfortunately stating this won’t make them go away, as you correctly noted neither content providers nor the majority of bloggers will make an effort to change anything. For my part I don’t use any external scripts on my site even though I use third-party content on a few occasions – it is fetched on the server-side.

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