What should have been an IMG element became this
The hoops people are going through to justify this are crazy to me. The comparison is not no-JS vs a business-capable website. They could serve a static image tag that would load quickly, and then load the comments&#x2F;content around it. Progressive enhancement has been a well-known development pattern on the web for a very, very long time.<p>The comparison here is, &quot;serving your content, and then doing whatever the heck you want&quot;, and &quot;dynamically fetching all of your core content on the fly after synchronously downloading and executing all of the auxiliary content that &gt;85% of your users do not care about.&quot;<p>I think Youtube is overengineered as well, but at least Youtube has the good sense to prioritize loading the video <i>first</i>, and the recommendations&#x2F;comments <i>second</i>.<p>It is surreal to jump from a thread with a Google dev telling me that user-agent scraping is necessary because progressive feature detection would require shipping unnecessary polyfills to modern browsers, to a conversation with an Imgur dev telling me that because 5% of their users need a special feature, everyone should wait twice as long to get core content served to them.<p>I realize these aren&#x27;t the same people, and the web development community is diverse, but... I don&#x27;t know how to reconcile those perspectives. We will jump through so many crazy, horrifying engineering hoops to get bundle sizes down: using statistics&#x2F;user-behavior to calculate dynamic bundles on the fly, user-agent sniffing, compiling Javascript frameworks, prefetching URLs, HTTP2. But serving an img tag with our core HTML is a bridge too far?