bboard

Hahahahaha. The content itself is in the fucking HTML - but hidden behind a <noscript> tag! So if you're browsing the site without JS, you just see the content immediately, but if your browser has JS enabled, you have to wait for the HTML to load completely (including the content), for the browser to parse the HTML and send a request to a javascript source file, wait for the javascript to load, get parsed, get to the point in execution where it sends a GET request to an API which serves the content, wait for the GET request to complete, the giant JSON payload to get parsed, and then finally JavaScript can do the DOM operations necessary to populate the body.

So with JavaScript disabled:

1. GET request to /hillelwayne/archive/i-ing-hate-science/
2. The response contains the post contents, so rendering of content starts even before all the HTML is downloaded

With JavaScript enabled:

1. GET request to /hillelwayne/archive/i-ing-hate-science/
2. Once the entire HTML body is downloaded, GET request to /.../main-<hash>.js
3. Once the entire JS script is download, parsed and executed, GET request to /api/emails/...
4. Once the entire JSON payload is downloaded, parse the JSON payload
5. Once the entire JSON payload is parsed, populate the body

Why do people make websites like this?

The funny thing is: The script which actually loads the e-mail is at the very bottom of the HTML. Normally, putting scripts at the bottom of the HTML is good practice, because you want the content to be loaded first, and JavaScript to be loaded after the content. But in this case, the javascript loads the content, so it's critical to start downloading it as soon as possible. The script tag should've been close to the very top of the HTML. But it's not, so the script which loads the actual content of the page is going to be loaded with essentially the lowest priority possible by the browser, and the browser won't even know about it before the entire post body is loaded (due to that aforementioned noscript tag).