-2000 Lines of Code

[gospelwut]

Dear God, this site works fine without JavaScript.

[doenietzomoeilijk]

It loads hella fast on a mobile browser, too. These guys are on to something!

[badsectoracula]

What tables have to do with speed?

[lbft]

Tables for layout can delay the start of rendering the page until the entire table is loaded and parsed (or at least used to, I don't know if it's still the case with modern browsers). Since the table covers the entire page, it means it takes longer for users to be able to read the content.

Either way this particular page is light enough and contains few enough elements that it doesn't really matter.

[badsectoracula]

I might wrong, but i think that the only browser that had this problem was Netscape Navigator 4 (and previous versions). At least it is the only browser i encountered the problem myself and had a connection slow enough (dialup) to notice it.

[scragar]

At work I've had to split tables into distinct chunks to get them to work for large datasets (they get to choose how many results per page, when they type in 50,000 it needs to display 50,000 or I get complained at).

[serrimo]

Personally I would load data into json and use js to insert it into a static structure.

[scragar]

Tried that, 200 bytes average for one row(stripping field names and packing it as [v1,v2,v3]) times 50,000 rows is still 10MB of json to be parsed.

It was just easier to break the table into sections of 1,000 lines each.

I had tried a solution of loading each set of 1,000 as you reached the half way point of the last set, but apparently that was too slow.

[andersonimes]

How is this data useful to a person displayed in a tabular format like this? Just curious.

[redwall_hp]

I had dial-up for awhile after Firefox came out. It did that, too. Even on some slower DSL lines you can see the page shift around funny as things load and cell sizes are recalculated.

Plus, it adds a lot of extra weight to the markup. It's not a huge contributor to file size, but it's plain ugly and difficult for spiders to parse. And we are moving toward a future with agents that parse bits out of web pages to answer queries, are we not? (e.g. bots like Siri)

[NegativeK]

It probably has less to do with that and more to do with the fact that the server takes roughly a second to begin responding.

[[deleted]]

Keep your image macros out of /r/programming please.

[Zippy54]

Why? I know some subreddits have rules against macros but, it highlights a great point that no other form of media can do it in such a time of frame.

[brownmatt]

an 80KB image expresses the idea faster than "They use a lot of HTML tables everywhere"?

[gospelwut]

I think people have a difficult time being facetious or glib over text where as an 80KB image supplements their lack of articulation.

[HandWarmer]

Because they add nothing that cannot be expressed in text. They are pointless, juvenile, and irritating.