Blogspot's massive web 1.0 failure

January 13, 2013

Once upon a time Blogspot was a popular independent blogging system (cf), one of many at the time. It didn't entirely prosper, so Google bought it and folded it into the massive Google empire. Somewhat recently (ie in the past year or so) Google started rolling out some changes that I happen to think are a terrible idea, and I've finally reached the point where I feel like ranting about them. Well, especially about the larger and most recent change.

Put simply, some Blogspot blogs actively require JavaScript in order to get any content at all. If you visit such a blog without JavaScript, you get basically nothing (okay, a list of useless links). This is not a case where the content is hidden or mangled until JavaScript sets up the page structures; this is a case where the content is not there at all until it's loaded with JavaScript. As such it's the very opposite of 'graceful degradation'.

(Making it worse for me is that such blogs don't work in my main Firefox for some reason even if I turn JavaScript fully on. I'm not sure why but the whole situation irritates me so much that I don't care about such blogs.)

This strikes me as extremely stupid. In my opinion it's harder to get more 'Web 1.0' than blogs; blogs are, well, text. And these days, pictures. It is not as if blogs are a Web 2.0 thing, like Google Maps or some complex interactive web application. What does dynamically loading all content on the fly through AJAX actually do for a blog, especially when you still give each entry its own URL?

(I'm sure it enables some fancy-dancy design tricks and so on. I'm just questioning if said fancy design tricks are actually worth losing graceful degradation through a great big middle finger to all of the people who do not see JavaScript-based content.)

Since there are still plenty of Blogspot blogs that don't work this way (for example, SysAdvent), I assume that this is some new blog 'theme' that Blogspot has rolled out and that (for now) people have to opt in to. Unfortunately I see an ever-increasing number of Blogspot blogs that suffer from this (which insures that I don't read their entries when they get shared on Twitter et al).

By the way, I'm aware that I'm an old fogie here and that 'everyone' (for suitable statistical values of everyone) has JavaScript turned on. I'm sure that Google, land of measurement and statistics, has plenty of numbers that show that a miniscule number of Blogspot visitors are no-JavaScript people.

(If you feel like a conspiracy theory, note that a bunch of money-earning Google features, including some parts of Google Adsense, require JavaScript. Google thus has a motive for pushing people to enable JS for at least Google's domains.)

Sidebar: the smaller Blogspot change

The first and smaller change was that all blogspot.com URLs started redirecting non-US visitors to a country-specific version of blogspot (for that URL); if you visited, say, fred.blogspot.com/entry from Canada you got redirected to fred.blogspot.ca/entry. Allegedly this is so that Google could more easily do country-specific blog blocking if they were legally required to do so. The two problems with this change are that it basically destroys URL history for people outside the US and that it results in a proliferation of URLs for the exact same content. Making the latter situation worse is the fact that if you visit a country specific URL you don't get redirected to the 'proper' version for you; you stay on that country specific URL.

(If you follow people outside the US on modern social networks and they share URLs with you, you may have noticed a proliferation of .ca or .co.uk or whatever blogspot URLs. This is why.)

Written on 13 January 2013.
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Last modified: Sun Jan 13 02:41:38 2013
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