Every now and again I spend sometime on some other sites of my working on new features and performance. One of the facets that comes up occasionally, especially on my photography site, with it’s tons of images, is lazy loading the images.
Now don’t get me wrong, lazy loading images makes a lot of sense. I have pages where I might have 2 or 3 MB of large high quality JPEGs on the page. As a photographers, small heavily compressed images with lots of artifacts isn’t something that I find attractive, or what I want to show of.
Problem 1: The web developer has to do it.
The problem here is that like so many things on the web, the burden of doing this has been put on the web developer.
Okay, sure, there are JavaScript scripts available from all over the place, in just about any license that you could imagine. And it’s not like the JS needs to be all that big. Moreover, you can certainly make an argument that it should be the web developer doing the implementation as some people might want, or depend on, the standard behavior of downloading everything.
That said, I’m going to make exactly the opposite argument here, well kind of.