No, not another opinion. Enough already. I am just keeping a record of them for future references. Flipboard.com website went through a major update and it created a buzz. Here are the details:
1. 60 FPS On The Mobile Web: [Published: February 10, 2015]
The DOM is too slow.
It’s not just slow, it’s really slow. If you touch the DOM in any way during an animation you’ve already blown through your 16ms frame budget.
Link: [http://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/02/mobile-web/].
And the reactions:
2. Flipboard comes to the web, and it’s beautiful: [Published: February 10, 2015]
On the bigger screen, Flipboard is big, beautiful, and responsive. In moving to the desktop, Flipboard hopes to open up a big new avenue of distribution. But can a mobile app like Flipboard win millions of new fans on the web, or is the company building for the past?
Link: [http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/10/8008905/flipboard-comes-to-the-web].
3. How Flipboard Chose Form Over Function For Their Web Version: [Published: February 11, 2015]
I am dismayed that Accessibility was treated not even as a mere afterthought, but as something worth sacrificing completely for the sake of flashiness.
Link: [http://farukat.es/journal/2015/02/708-how-flipboard-chose-form-over-function-their-web-version].
4. Flipboard – React Canvas Accessibility: [Published: February 11, 2015]
Testing the Flipboard site on a mobile device such as an iPhone, quickly reveals that the content is not available to screen reader users. This is because the content is painted onto a canvas element using React Canvas. The words, structure and UI are all visual, there is nothing but pixels.
Link: [http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2015/02/flipboard-react-canvas-accessibility/].
5. On Flipboard.com and Idealism vs. Pragmatism: [Published: February 13, 2015]
The obsession with 60fps has lead Flipboard to completely reimplement the DOM, but without any of the things that the DOM is good for, reintroducing many of the problems that we fought against for many years in the form of Flash.
Link: [http://www.broken-links.com/2015/02/13/flipboard-com-idealism-vs-pragmatism/].
6. Flipboard And The “Mobile Web” Dream…: [Published: February 15, 2015]
What this post told me most of all is that it isn’t solving an issue of the web.
Link: [http://christianheilmann.com/2015/02/15/flipboard-and-the-mobile-web-dream/].
7. Accessibility vs User Experience: 60 FPS, Flipboard, And The High Road To The GPU: [Published: February 15, 2015]
TLDR Has the pursuit of jank elimination has come at the cost of accessibility? Yes, for now, but in the end we will look back on these techniques as hacks to get around subpar browser rendering performance.
Link: [http://rachelnabors.com/2015/02/15/accessibility-vs-ux/].
8. 60 Frames Per Second And The Web: [Published: February 15, 2015]
60 frames per second is not “would be nice”. It’s “must have”. And the DOM doesn’t have it.
Link: [http://daringfireball.net/2015/02/60_frames_per_second_and_the_web].
9. Radical Statements about the Mobile Web: [Published: February 20, 2015]
There are land mines in browser JavaScript that kill performance: DOM APIs. All of them are synchronous. If you touch the DOM, the entire JS engine may block for a while.
Link: [http://jlongster.com/Radical-Statements-about-the-Mobile-Web].
10. React Is A Terrible Idea: [Published: March 11, 2015]
A good framework supports separation of concerns. Web components do not impose a way of representing views or attaching event handlers or rendering to the DOM. A bad framework couples those things together so that you can’t use one without the others. That’s what React does.
Link: [https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20150311-react-bad-idea].
Ciao.
Moving Pixels 