JavaScript Badges and Widgets Considered Harmful.
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Awful list if you ask me.
1) Rather a hack than some cookie cutter 3rd party approved tool-in-a-box that can only be used the way someone says it can be used. The web is dynamic now, that’s just the way it is.
2) Search engines mine most of my widgets just fine. Sure, javascript stuff may be left out, but people put javascript stuff for their visitors, not the search engines. Don’t stop writing for visitors.
3) That’s an issue the webmaster has to take care in. Don’t overload and you’ve got no problem.
4) The vast majority of people either don’t want to skin something, or they’re simply not good at it and thus make a bad looking design. It has nothing to do with widgets being “hard to skin”.
5) Why should they? If they don’t work than it solves his other 4 problems.
I have to disagree with most of his points. He’s complaining about shitty implementations. 99% of his issues can be solved by a more robust implementation and data access options. With blogrolling (5 years ago now) I built multiple options for data retrieval so you could skip the JS altogether but if you were lazy or didn’t know programming you could use a widget. You can also bypass the loading issues with some clever overloading of the JS to build an iframe first if the content has a static size then loading the real JS inside that. There are workarounds to almost every issue he pointed out if you care to look or do the leg work. I think it’s more of a ubiquitous lack of understanding in implementation from most of the widget providers that’s got him pissed.
Another thing about “badges” is that they almost always use document.write() which is bad (and worse for sites that are delivered in real XHTML). Though I did manage to write a fix for those situations 🙂
Thanks, I appreciated that article. I’m new to blogging and it made alot of sense to me. I also don’t get how so many don’t seem to get that not everyone can afford high priced hosting packages.. some of us have to make do with low cost shared hosting. How good can online communication be if it’s only representative of those who can afford top of the line everything…
BTW, really loved the podcast interview you did with Brian Oberkirch.
That is one of the worst written articles on this subject I’ve read. Really poor points.
It may as well have been titled “Poorly written code considered harmful” – which while true.. is hardly news.
I fully agree with all of his points. Javascript widgets/badges are horrible. They’re the most lowbrow possible way to get third party content into ones site, and I avoid them whenever possible.
I keep trying them in moderation and each time I’ll eventually turn them off for performance reasons. They might work fine for weeks and then boom. Why is caching so rare with these? The point of these things I guess is to get data from *your* site. I want my visitors to be there for *my* site.
So I’m torn, there are a few that I’d like to use but they’re simply not reliable enough.
Then there is the problem with original content. Some people have nothing but outside content and copy/paste. Too much of that and there will be little actual content. Some blogs are already like watching tv, and I don’t want that.
However, Matt’s way of linking to the content and inviting discussion is great. Click to view vs embed is more logical. Time to balance efficiency with the bling.