Respectful websites (dkolf.de)

Introduction

Money makes the world go round, and the web is a part of this world. However, many websites are in my opinion going too far: They are treating their readers primarily as a resource. This article is my wish list on how more respectful websites would behave.

Author: David Heiko Kolf, 2025-06-24

Respect my privacy

Most websites are tracking their users and helping data brokers build vast knowledge about the behavior and interests of us. Quite often, this can be used to nudge us into a new behavior (buying or political support) that we otherwise would not have done on our own. While I have met many people who claim they themselves are resistant to any manipulation and it might only work on "other" people, even the changed behavior of those other people can influence us all negatively. I certainly noticed that my own mood and attitudes can be influenced by what I read and that certain brands who used advertisements appear more familiar to me. Depending on the government or some private rating agencies, much more dramatic actions can be executed based on the tracking.

The primary technology for tracking users are "cookies" — small tokens saved on our computers, which the browser sends back to the website every time the website is visited. Cookies are necessary for logins: The website needs to remember that it is you, who is opening further pages on the site. They are also necessary for storing settings the user has changed. However, unless I am entering a user name or changing a setting, there is no good reason for a website to set any cookie.

It is an additional annoyance when tracking "consent" dialogs are telling me they "value my privacy". The contradiction makes it much worse: someone who values my privacy would not track me at all! It is also bad, when the dialog tells me that many of the cookies are "necessary" and I cannot opt-out of them at all (or I have to uncheck a long list manually). Again, that is a not the truth: as long as I do not explicitly click a login button or explicitly change some setting, no cookies are necessary.

Respect my data rate

I have sometimes heard the attitude that websites do not need to optimize for a small transmission size at all, as nowadays every user that counts has an unlimited, high bandwidth data connection. Many websites appear to be built following this mindset.

However, limited data connections are still sold. When traveling, high extra fees can be charged per megabyte. Sometimes you might be (or even live) in an area with poor mobile reception. Those websites do not respect anybody who needs to rely on such a connection.

Respect my battery

Modern web technologies enable building amazing apps that run directly in the browser. However, most websites are just displaying some content. There is an amazing app, which can do this: the browser itself.

When a website takes too many resources for scripts, the battery of mobile devices is drained faster. In addition, users might get the impression that their device is "getting slower", while in reality the websites just need unnecessary extra resources for what is still essentially the same task (displaying a news article or a blog post). So this artificially inefficient websites are even causing secondary resource waste when people are discarding otherwise perfectly functional devices.

Some websites go as far as not containing any text in the initial file that is sent from the server and only loading the text piece by piece using a script. This usually results in very poor performance.

At the time I am writing this, YouTube is an extreme example of such a badly designed website, where the comments appear to be more resource intense than the video. On an old computer, I have to manipulate the URL of a video to see the embedded version of it — the computer is perfectly capable of rendering video, but struggles with whatever the coders at Google put in the site around the video.

Respect my attention

When a website is displaying some animation next to text, my ability to read and comprehend the text diminishes extremely. Active animations are also harmful to the bandwidth usage, battery life and website performance.

When I open a website I want to read its content; anything that hides the content until I click it away is a nuisance:

A further nuisance are integrated machine translations (common for example in YouTube and Microsoft's programming documentations). They are often wrong in subtle ways. They are wasting my time until I notice what is going on and then I have to search for the setting to turn them off. When a website is in a language I do not understand, I can open a translation tool myself or turn the option for an integrated translation on.

Next is the layout: When I started learning how to build websites in the late 1990s, one rule I learned is that the layout of a website should be stable as soon as possible, so that users can already read the text while the images might still load. Many modern websites however do not keep a stable layout. This disrupts me when I already started reading the text, or I might click on the wrong link because the layout changed. Maybe that is even intentional, but now that website is cheating not just me, but also the advertiser, as I probably won't stay long on the site it took me to.

Retro is not the future

In the previous paragraph, I mentioned the 1990s. Some people who share the grievances I outlined on this page are voicing the opinion that the past was better than whatever we have now and they want to go back to the "good old days" of the internet. Other people decide that content is all that matters and leave their websites completely without any style.

However, I consider those attitudes problematic. Some things did improve in the last decades and there were horrible and abusive websites even back then. Plain or retro-looking websites can convince both users and designers that you need all those negative aspects in order to build good-looking websites.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are a web technology that in my opinion can vastly improve the quality of websites compared to the 90s. In fact, I am convinced that a minimum of CSS is necessary for any website.

JavaScript in moderation can also improve the usage. For example in my image galleries, I have a small script to support touch gestures, which I noticed that users tried using. On a website where the content keeps updating, JavaScript (AJAX to be specific) can also help, so users do not need to refresh the entire website continuously in order to check for new content. Any script should be from the same domain as the rest of the website to minimize security and privacy vulnerabilities.

A good example of an efficient, modern website is in my opinion Lobste.rs (in 2025 — though I hope they keep it that way in the future), a link aggregator and comments website for programming topics. It does not use any JavaScript (at least for guest visits) and it does not waste bandwidth. Unfortunately, it does set session cookies for guests when looking at a comments section, but other than that I consider it a good example for what is possible with minimal resources and clever use of CSS.

Commerce is fine

On the topic of the "good old time", I have sometimes read that some people are critical of "commercial" websites. In my opinion, we need to distinguish different kinds of commerce. In the end, most people like to earn money.

When a company is selling products and they have a website describing and documenting their products, I like that. I would not want to miss that website.

What I do not like however is when I am the product. Many websites contain minimal, low effort content (click bait/spam) just in order to appear in the list of search engines and sell my accidental views to trackers and advertisers. The internet would be better if those sites did not exist at all.

For higher quality content, I see advertisements as a legitimate way to get some money for the efforts. As long as they are not animated. I just wish there were advertisement networks that do not use any tracking. For more than a century, advertisements were put in newspapers next to content, which was likely to be read by potential customers. In the last few decades however, web companies told us that only personalized advertisements work. I believe that online newspapers harmed themselves with this business model: The tracking companies can get all the user data from the newspapers and later display the targeted advertisements elsewhere.

A directory would be nice

There are already efforts to direct more attention to efficient websites:

What I would personally like to see is a web directory sorted by topics where I can easily browse "respectful websites". However, I am afraid that maintaining such a web directory can be quite resource intense (generating enough attention, moderating the content and dealing with legal questions).

Summary

In summary, my checklist for a respectful website is:

Further reading