Re: To temporarily disable annotations sidebar

I think this is a good idea. The annotations sidebar does slow the site
down tremendously, bringing the page load to 57 javascript files and 8 CSS
files.  YSlow gives the site a 'D'.

Study after study shows that web pages that load slowly loose users. I do
think the UX of the current Annotations is confusing — with a separate
login, and a mysterious line / sidebar-thingy down the right side of the
page. Web Platform needs all the help it can get to take off. Having slow
loading pages that feel janky and have this confusing sidebar login thing
doesn't help.

Why don't we temporarily disable the Annotations system, and bring it back
when 1) the performance is fast, and 2) the UX is solved. And then
meanwhile focus on getting the compatibility table system done.

Jen

Jen Simmons
designer, consultant and speaker
host of The Web Ahead
jensimmons.com
5by5.tv/webahead
twitter: jensimmons <http://twitter.com/jensimmons>



On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 4:15 PM, Renoir Boulanger <renoir@w3.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I’ve been thinking to disable temporarily the annotation sidebar and I’d
> like your opinion about it.
>
> The day before the Beyond Tellerand DocSprint, I spent more than hour
> with somebody on IRC because he couldn’t login to edit pages. Its only
> after some time that I realized that he was using the annotation sidebar
> as the only way to register to our site. He’s most likely not the only
> one who got caught with it.
>
> Maybe its better to remove confusion factors and enable it only when we
> have the Accounts-system/SSO enabled. Something that’s coming soon anyway.
>
> Besides that, it also impacts the site load time. In fact, the sidebar
> loader calls a bunch of files like a web application development
> environment would —not a production one, which our deployment is. Their
> development stack (Python) actually has the piping to minify their
> assets, its just not configured yet.
>
>
> My proposal:
>
> - Disable the automatic annotator sidebar loader
> - Keep the notes.webplatform.org
> - Upgrade the annotator as soon as its available, that includes:
>   - SSO integration (they’re almost there)
>   - Sidebar loader performance (in progress)
>
> The time frame is about a week or so.
>
> Opinions
>
> --
> Regards,
>
> Renoir Boulanger  |  Developer operations engineer
> W3C  |  Web Platform Project
>
> http://w3.org/people/#renoirb  ✪  https://renoirboulanger.com/  ✪
>  @renoirb
> ~
>
>
>