Drop jQuery/Bootstrap from pages that don't need them

[Keno]

We indiscriminately include jQuery/Bootstrap on every page. I do not believe (and neither does Google's performance assesment, which is what I was looking at) that we're actually using them on most pages. We should drop them if we don't to improve site performance.

[tlienart]

hmm as far as I'm aware every page has the menu bar (e.g. mobile), and the menu bar requires bootstrap + jQuery. No doubt there could be a slimmed down version (for bootstrap it's reasonably easy to do for jQ not sure) but it's typically not trivial to adjust these things. If someone versed in web dev could give it a shot, that'd be great (i.e.:

• review the menu and see whether it could be re-written in a way that doesn't require jQuery
• check that a jQuery-free alternative doesn't otherwise break the site (e.g. landing page)
• (easy) add purgecss pass to the deployment to get a stripped down version of bootstrap with only what we need

I could do the last point but the first two requires someone who knows their way with frameworks

[ViralBShah]

Should this issue be migrated to the Franklin repo?

[tlienart]

uh no, this is about the page layout not about anything Franklin controls.

Basically pages are built like this:

[[ insert HEAD.HTML ]]
[[ insert converted content from Franklin ]]
[[ insert FOOT.HTML ]]

head and foot are things that indicate what CSS is needed or what Javascript is needed; you can have rules such as for instance not having highlight.js loaded on pages without code blocks or only loading specific interactive javascript stuff for blog posts that need them; but Bootstrap + jQuery is what the base layout used from the previous site and it was just ported to the current one to reproduce the previous layout.

There's no doubt we only use a small portion of this combo, but unfortunately thinning this to a compact "what we use" is hard and annoying and requires a lot of careful testing to avoid issues with responsiveness etc. Someone with lots of experience in front-end web dev stuff (and bootstrap) could be helpful here.

I think the suggestions I made above still hold; adding purgecss` will help significantly reduce the CSS footprint (though even this needs careful testing); in terms of jQuery, I don't know where it's needed/used but before we know that 100% removing it will break the website in unknown ways.

In short: solving this issue requires a fair bit of tedious web dev work; it might be best just re-doing the layout completely without javascript (or as little as possible) but that also requires a fair bit of work so that's where this issue is stuck...

[ViralBShah]

I don't think we should worry about it much. We can just leave this open...