Is the "flash of unstyled content" really so "dreaded"?
I've noticed it regularly on the publish side of the Google Play Store.
The chain reaction this sets off in my head is about 100 FUOC's long. And it goes something like this.
Hey, I just saw a FUOC on the Google Play store admin!
They must not be optimizing CSS delivery for above-the-fold content... [0]
Or maybe they just don't lavish the same resources on admin sites as they do on front-end...
I mean, did anyone else see that? And what if they did? What would they think? They wouldn't think anything, because only a web developer would even recognize a FOUC...
And even if someone else saw it and recognized it for what it was... so what?
If I tried to explain to someone what happened in that moment, that Google, yes, Google had failed to expend all the necessary brain power on ensuring that their markup was not rendered a fraction of a second before their stylesheets were parsed...
And that people actually care about that, actually want to protect users from that horrid sight...
I use a lot of high latency connections (my country has rather slow ping times to major internet centres - around 200ms) and sometimes connections just get "stuck" when loading the CSS.
This results in seeing the title of the page with a loading spinner and a blank white page. If browsers actually rendered the page (is CSS really that important on a news site?) I would at least be able to see the content.
I have the same problem with my internet. So many times have I given up waiting and just hit cmd+u to view page source and read the info I want in raw html.
Paranoia over the FOUC is the bane of my web browsing days. Any time you use unstable internet (hostels in poor countries), designers' prude paranoia over their naked content being shown without the proper styling or font, it ruins modern web browsing. I stopped timing when every other page I saw was literally > 1 minute of waiting. Started using view-source: to just read the damn content.
Please, for the love of God, stop hiding content behind styles. Please. Please please please.
Comments
Is the "flash of unstyled content" really so "dreaded"?
I've noticed it regularly on the publish side of the Google Play Store.
The chain reaction this sets off in my head is about 100 FUOC's long. And it goes something like this.
Hey, I just saw a FUOC on the Google Play store admin!
They must not be optimizing CSS delivery for above-the-fold content... [0]
Or maybe they just don't lavish the same resources on admin sites as they do on front-end...
I mean, did anyone else see that? And what if they did? What would they think? They wouldn't think anything, because only a web developer would even recognize a FOUC...
And even if someone else saw it and recognized it for what it was... so what?
If I tried to explain to someone what happened in that moment, that Google, yes, Google had failed to expend all the necessary brain power on ensuring that their markup was not rendered a fraction of a second before their stylesheets were parsed...
And that people actually care about that, actually want to protect users from that horrid sight...
I would be seen for what I am, which is a madman.
[0] https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/OptimizeCS...
I use a lot of high latency connections (my country has rather slow ping times to major internet centres - around 200ms) and sometimes connections just get "stuck" when loading the CSS.
This results in seeing the title of the page with a loading spinner and a blank white page. If browsers actually rendered the page (is CSS really that important on a news site?) I would at least be able to see the content.
I have the same problem with my internet. So many times have I given up waiting and just hit cmd+u to view page source and read the info I want in raw html.
Paranoia over the FOUC is the bane of my web browsing days. Any time you use unstable internet (hostels in poor countries), designers' prude paranoia over their naked content being shown without the proper styling or font, it ruins modern web browsing. I stopped timing when every other page I saw was literally > 1 minute of waiting. Started using view-source: to just read the damn content.
Please, for the love of God, stop hiding content behind styles. Please. Please please please.