I think these things are very related, but Microformats isn't going to solve this problem on its own. After all, it's been around for quite a while, just like most of these conventions.

10-15 years ago, we had a bunch of different ways everyone was trying to schematize their data on the web, and since we never all agreed to just use one of them, everyone now uses fragments of all of them — and of other pseudo-proprietary systems — in their own unique ways.

Indeed - every silo wants you to use their own specific markup, but even then they choose what to show. I made a post a while back that gave a different summary on every silo platform https://www.kevinmarks.com/partialsilos.html Of course, since then some of the silos have died or given up on their own systems, but microformats remains useful if you want to co-operate.

The cost here is not from rendering speed — as you point out, UI rendering is so fast in most modern environments, even on a bad day, that drawing the UI itself is pretty much never the actual load that slows anything to a crawl.

Based on the author's description, it sounds like the real cost here was from way over-diffing a set of models that weren't very efficiently bound to the UI. This is a very common source of bugs in all declarative frameworks.

In SwiftUI, the consequences can be particularly bad, because there are a couple somewhat innocent-sounding ways of injecting dependencies into your UI that actually invalidate the whole thing on any value's change and cause major updates (including, if a custom "Representable" that uses its own GPU tools is not implemented carefully, potentially reallocating all kinds of buffers and drawing tools).

This is all stuff that you learn how to deal with as you get used to the framework and learn its more advanced tools, but adapting to this part is not really something there's a lot of documentation for.

Aside from some of the common critiques of purpose-oriented blockchain tech, I think there's a question with BAT of if creating a token-based ecosystem with this thing actually creates economic incentives that align with the overall improvement of our society, or if it merely contributes to the existing problems that have enabled intrusive ad tech in the first place.

On a small scale, paying to be able to take away ads (or getting paid to see them — ultimately, the difference is negligible, given how pervasive ads are in our lives) is a nice experience to have. But it has a lot of implications long-term on our society, given ads are the primary way we finance pretty much all information we have access to these days.

How does this affect upward mobility? If a person in poverty wants to get out of poverty by learning a difficult skill, getting access to the information and learning it will be a longer, more difficult process for them. They will be interrupted more often than wealthier people, they will have less time to dedicate to doing the task at hand than wealthier people, etc.

I personally think it's difficult to get excited about any system that wraps the way we gate access to information in our society without considering this element, because the ability for people to move up in life is really one of the great promises of the internet, and nobody should lose that.

But we have all this today. Just install an adblocker. Ads are hardly pervasive at all for me, I really rarely see them unless I go out on the street. On the internet adblocking is almost 100% effective and I don't watch live TV.

In fact I see people who are more wealthy not using adblockers and paywall bypassers because they feel like they should support the sites somehow. It's a similar thing with downloading video content, many of my better-off friends are not downloading because they are worried about content disappearing. They actually care about the overall economic model working. My friends from worse circumstances (I know many people in lesser-off countries) don't give a shit about that and download all they can get. And I agree with them.

I myself don't have this worry. Content will never disappear one way or another. We had content on the internet before ads were really a thing and it was better than it is now in many ways. And I like cutting into the big megacorps' profits.

They absolutely can, if your workload is ideal for this situation, but unfortunately, the most "expensive" (in terms of time, money, computing power, you name it) part of giving a user information is typically the filtering and collation of that information from a much larger pool of information — almost always a pool of information that is far too big and too private to just send to the client to sort through locally.

Even in the most simple scenarios, you quickly find your limits. If you get data back, but it's paginated (and it almost always has to be, for basic reliability reasons as much as anything else), you can't be guaranteed to have the complete set of data in a given circumstance, so you can't perform operations like filtering, pivoting, or sorting that data locally. You have to ask the server to do this for you and wait for the response, just like we've had to in the past.

Dynamic loading of content is a feature of SPAs, but it's not a defining feature, nor unique. In fact, one defining feature of SPAs is the offline capabilities (service workers, caching, etc.), which sits at a bit of a tangent to database considerations like this.