It's curious that some folks hate the side effects of insufficient infrastructure while missing that the lack of modern infrastructure is the root problem.
It is entirely possible to get a cell signal on a train, even in tunnels. We as a society just choose not to build out the necessary infrastructure.
As a user, I have very little control over 99.999% of all sites' infrastructures. We were talking about lazy loading on a train. Most users have no control over the HTML attributes they receive.
As software developers make up a vanishingly small amount of all users on trains, it seems prudent to highlight their collective experience, not the portion of a one-off that you can control as an individual contributor.
I'm well aware that you or I as individuals have very little control over public transit infrastructure. It's a shame we cannot team up as a group to solve these issues rather than fixate on our experiences solely through a personal lens.
Adding physical networking infrastructure to all the trains and everything else is a much bigger job than adding a setting to a browser that lets the user opt out of lazy loading.
In all seriousness, as engineers we of course can't assume the happy path is common, and to ensure good UX more often than not we need to account for these cases.
I'm not sure how you possibly got that reading from what I wrote.
I'm am discussing a solution rather than a series of ephemeral and incomplete fixes. Not that developers can solve public transit issues but that society at large is the only one that can truly solve these issues.
The users are not wrong in my assertion nor do I think disabling lazy loading is the solution. Disabling lazy loading is an ephemeral and incomplete fix that helps some scenarios while degrading the experience in other scenarios.
The solution is improved infrastructure. I don't see why this position is controversial.
So:
developers can't change the way society has chosen to prioritize infrastructure, Poor user experience is the result of this societal failure, thus there is nothing that can be done to improve user experience?
It seems more likely that the expectation that users must have consistent connectivity to load (and keep loaded) the most fundamental aspects of a website (images and text) is a poor assumption and the hubris to leave this type of assumption unchecked the actual root problem.
If the problem was out-of-viewport images impeding the receipt of assets that do affect the viewport (CSS, fonts, etc.) then it would be good to postpone fetching those images just until everything else is received, rather than postponing until they're closer to the viewport.
In this case it's also the choice of the user, they could choose to ignore the lazy loading tags (I know OP mentions their browser doesn't supports it, but they could choose another browser)
> Right, because it's expensive and difficult and would make the train cost more.
That you (and others) think network connectivity is anything higher than a rounding error in terms of rail infrastructure costs is likely part of the problem.
Software is easier to adapt than everything else and users don't care why your website doesn't work properly.
Building a website with the assumption that the user will have a perfect internet connection is like writing an application without error handling. When something goes wrong you can't just blame reality for being imperfect.
It is entirely possible to get a cell signal on a train, even in tunnels. We as a society just choose not to build out the necessary infrastructure.