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If I may contribute to the article somehow, I'd tell people this: stop using JavaScript for basic markup. I sigh every time I visit a site whose entire navigati

If I may contribute to the article somehow, I'd tell people this: stop using JavaScript for basic markup. I sigh every time I visit a site whose entire navigation structure is spit out in front of me as a disorganized wall of text, and only when I enable JavaScript that mess gets cleaned up and arranged back into something organized. It's just no way to design pages. CSS is for visual appearance and styling. JavaScript is for interactivity. If you can't give your site a proper look without resorting to JavaScript then you have no business designing web pages yet and need to go learn the basics first.

tomjen3 10y ago
Thats because CSS is not powerful enough, not helped that you can't use something like flexbox if you need to support old browsers but even the latest version of $YOUR_BROWSER does not have a way to say that I want a list element to layout its elements in one vertical column that is also centered vertically on the screen if it has fewer elements than there is space for on a screen, but having it split into additional columns and align all elements in all columns to the top if there are more elements than space on the screen. It is a fairly simple layout and I ended up having to do it in JS because flexbox only has a few standard modes for what to do when the content overflows and those don't effect the margins of the element. CSS needs to be replaced with a more capable scripting language, or at least one based on constraints but until that happens we are stuck with javascript.
- jordanlev 10y ago
  Most of the places I see javascript being used for layout are not doing complex things that can only be done in javascript. At the very least, there should be a non-javascript fallback so the content is visible and somewhat layed out. All mediums have limitations.
- gkya 10y ago
  CSS is good enough. It's overdesigning that makes the web the crap it is today.
- AndreyErmakov 10y ago
  When I was a beginner I also tried to design all kinds of fancy, flexible and auto-adjusting stuff. With years I came to the understanding that most of it is just unnecessary and wouldn't diminish the user experience in any way if you didn't do it the fancy way and instead went with a simpler route. CSS like any technology has its limits. In reality it is often good because it forces you to rethink what you're doing and reconsider whether you really need it. If we had a technology with unlimited capabilities, a lot of developers would be lost there forever and wouldn't be able to accomplish the larger goal completely lost in pursuing all the secondary details they could possibly imagine.
- wwweston 10y ago
  > Thats because CSS is not powerful enough This kind of objection is totally missing the point. And this isn't an argument that CSS doesn't have painful limits (it does) or even about what constitutes "enough" (within its limits, CSS offers enough possibilities that your own ideas of what the app "should" be like may be as much as a limit as the problems of CSS are). The power of CSS is largely orthogonal to the underlying issue. Ideally, your web site/app is still usable even with every last stylesheet completely ignored. It should work with Lynx, or with entirely non-visual user agents (screenreaders, search bots, Siri etc). CSS should enhance via layout and other presentation rules where that's possible. JS should provide more convenient application behavior where that's possible. Instead, we've slipped into a space where the browser (and, frequently enough, one browser) is simply considered The VM That Lived™, just another runtime target. And that's a sign of its growing power, and that power isn't a bad thing because there are in fact some applications that don't fit the hypermedia model well and the browser's ability to play the just another runtime role opens a space for them. But the rush to get into that space is considerably overdone and apparently executed without a lot of awareness of what's been lost in moving that way.
  - softawre 10y ago
    If my users care about and/or use Lynx that I will support it. Until then, it's just a feature that doesn't have the ROI to invest in.
    - wwweston 10y ago
      Sure, sometimes you have to make tradeoffs for what you have time to invest in. But this isn't really about supporting the world's Lynx users specifically. There's a reason I put a whole class of non-mainstream UAs in there (and in particular Siri, given how likely it is that entirely non-visual UAs are to become more mainstream at some point, perhaps soon, on top of the awareness that intermediary UAs like GoogleBot are of course ubiquitous and clearly important). And which UAs you try to support has a chicken and egg effect on which UAs get employed as intermediaries in accessing your site/app... and therefore which UAs you think you see using it. Usage follows accessibility perhaps even more surely than accomodation follows demand. If that weren't enough, the decision to do the things that would mean that your site is usable in Lynx is not just a feature -- it's also a technical decision. And like other technical decisions (database, language, library, application architecture, idioms and patterns you use, and data serialization/interchange format... which is actually part of what this decision actually is), it matters to how well your product performs and how tractable it is to develop and maintain, as well as how widely it can be consumed. If you're having to make cold hard decisions about ROI for features, chances are decent that you're better off for thinking about whether it works in Lynx and why, even if not one single user visits with that specific UA.
Dr_tldr 10y ago
Most of enterprise development is on rich web apps that couldn't work at all with javascript. Saying that people who write javascript and don't use semantic html need to "learn the basics" is like complaining about people typing emails instead of hand-writing letters in cursive. People like yourself who want HTML fallbacks for everything have a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of technology. At some point, it doesn't make sense for the biggest roads to have support for both cars and horse-drawn wagons.
- AndreyErmakov 10y ago
  Any road will support a horse-drawn carriage. Unless you take extraordinary measures and start building vehicles using wheels with special profiles for which custom-designed roads will be necessary where those wheels will be held on track like with trains. Naturally horses will stumble on those, and people like you will say the others don't understand the nature of transportation and should get rid of their old horses and conventional cars. But perhaps the problem is just with you and you newly designed fancy wheels.
  - Dr_tldr 10y ago
    Except you're a a tiny and economically irrelevant minority who own cars but are intentionally disabling them due to some sort of mental block about it not being the year 1994 anymore. If you want to be Cyber-Amish, that's absolutely your right, but much like the actual Amish, you will need to create your own society that serves your needs instead of trying to drag us back into the past with you.The Amish are not demanding that the International Space Station build a wooden module to accommodate them, nor do they buy plane tickets with the expectation that the pilot will still get them there but won't turn on the engine due to the religious beliefs of a tiny minority. Everyone has the right to unreasonable beliefs, but when they try to be smug and condescending about their own backwardness... yeah. You are the human equivalent of IE6.
- PavlovsCat 10y ago
  > Most of enterprise development is on rich web apps that couldn't work at all with javascript. Doesn't enterprise development stay within enterprises? As for the public facing web, even if the functionality requires Javascript, having it look like crap without Javascript does seem kind of lazy. I'm even for being lazy, I don't test everything and on every device, but when something is pointed out to me, at least I realize it's suboptimal, and don't rationalize regression into progress. https://www.w3.org/wiki/Graceful_degradation_versus_progressive_enhancement https://www.w3.org/wiki/Graceful_degradation_versus_progress... Nothing really changed to make these best practices moot.

tomjen3 10y ago

Thats because CSS is not powerful enough, not helped that you can't use something like flexbox if you need to support old browsers but even the latest version of $YOUR_BROWSER does not have a way to say that I want a list element to layout its elements in one vertical column that is also centered vertically on the screen if it has fewer elements than there is space for on a screen, but having it split into additional columns and align all elements in all columns to the top if there are more elements than space on the screen. It is a fairly simple layout and I ended up having to do it in JS because flexbox only has a few standard modes for what to do when the content overflows and those don't effect the margins of the element. CSS needs to be replaced with a more capable scripting language, or at least one based on constraints but until that happens we are stuck with javascript.

jordanlev 10y ago
Most of the places I see javascript being used for layout are not doing complex things that can only be done in javascript. At the very least, there should be a non-javascript fallback so the content is visible and somewhat layed out. All mediums have limitations.
gkya 10y ago
CSS is good enough. It's overdesigning that makes the web the crap it is today.
AndreyErmakov 10y ago
When I was a beginner I also tried to design all kinds of fancy, flexible and auto-adjusting stuff. With years I came to the understanding that most of it is just unnecessary and wouldn't diminish the user experience in any way if you didn't do it the fancy way and instead went with a simpler route. CSS like any technology has its limits. In reality it is often good because it forces you to rethink what you're doing and reconsider whether you really need it. If we had a technology with unlimited capabilities, a lot of developers would be lost there forever and wouldn't be able to accomplish the larger goal completely lost in pursuing all the secondary details they could possibly imagine.
wwweston 10y ago
> Thats because CSS is not powerful enough This kind of objection is totally missing the point. And this isn't an argument that CSS doesn't have painful limits (it does) or even about what constitutes "enough" (within its limits, CSS offers enough possibilities that your own ideas of what the app "should" be like may be as much as a limit as the problems of CSS are). The power of CSS is largely orthogonal to the underlying issue. Ideally, your web site/app is still usable even with every last stylesheet completely ignored. It should work with Lynx, or with entirely non-visual user agents (screenreaders, search bots, Siri etc). CSS should enhance via layout and other presentation rules where that's possible. JS should provide more convenient application behavior where that's possible. Instead, we've slipped into a space where the browser (and, frequently enough, one browser) is simply considered The VM That Lived™, just another runtime target. And that's a sign of its growing power, and that power isn't a bad thing because there are in fact some applications that don't fit the hypermedia model well and the browser's ability to play the just another runtime role opens a space for them. But the rush to get into that space is considerably overdone and apparently executed without a lot of awareness of what's been lost in moving that way.
- softawre 10y ago
  If my users care about and/or use Lynx that I will support it. Until then, it's just a feature that doesn't have the ROI to invest in.
  - wwweston 10y ago
    Sure, sometimes you have to make tradeoffs for what you have time to invest in. But this isn't really about supporting the world's Lynx users specifically. There's a reason I put a whole class of non-mainstream UAs in there (and in particular Siri, given how likely it is that entirely non-visual UAs are to become more mainstream at some point, perhaps soon, on top of the awareness that intermediary UAs like GoogleBot are of course ubiquitous and clearly important). And which UAs you try to support has a chicken and egg effect on which UAs get employed as intermediaries in accessing your site/app... and therefore which UAs you think you see using it. Usage follows accessibility perhaps even more surely than accomodation follows demand. If that weren't enough, the decision to do the things that would mean that your site is usable in Lynx is not just a feature -- it's also a technical decision. And like other technical decisions (database, language, library, application architecture, idioms and patterns you use, and data serialization/interchange format... which is actually part of what this decision actually is), it matters to how well your product performs and how tractable it is to develop and maintain, as well as how widely it can be consumed. If you're having to make cold hard decisions about ROI for features, chances are decent that you're better off for thinking about whether it works in Lynx and why, even if not one single user visits with that specific UA.

Dr_tldr 10y ago

Most of enterprise development is on rich web apps that couldn't work at all with javascript. Saying that people who write javascript and don't use semantic html need to "learn the basics" is like complaining about people typing emails instead of hand-writing letters in cursive. People like yourself who want HTML fallbacks for everything have a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of technology. At some point, it doesn't make sense for the biggest roads to have support for both cars and horse-drawn wagons.

AndreyErmakov 10y ago
Any road will support a horse-drawn carriage. Unless you take extraordinary measures and start building vehicles using wheels with special profiles for which custom-designed roads will be necessary where those wheels will be held on track like with trains. Naturally horses will stumble on those, and people like you will say the others don't understand the nature of transportation and should get rid of their old horses and conventional cars. But perhaps the problem is just with you and you newly designed fancy wheels.
- Dr_tldr 10y ago
  Except you're a a tiny and economically irrelevant minority who own cars but are intentionally disabling them due to some sort of mental block about it not being the year 1994 anymore. If you want to be Cyber-Amish, that's absolutely your right, but much like the actual Amish, you will need to create your own society that serves your needs instead of trying to drag us back into the past with you.The Amish are not demanding that the International Space Station build a wooden module to accommodate them, nor do they buy plane tickets with the expectation that the pilot will still get them there but won't turn on the engine due to the religious beliefs of a tiny minority. Everyone has the right to unreasonable beliefs, but when they try to be smug and condescending about their own backwardness... yeah. You are the human equivalent of IE6.
PavlovsCat 10y ago
> Most of enterprise development is on rich web apps that couldn't work at all with javascript. Doesn't enterprise development stay within enterprises? As for the public facing web, even if the functionality requires Javascript, having it look like crap without Javascript does seem kind of lazy. I'm even for being lazy, I don't test everything and on every device, but when something is pointed out to me, at least I realize it's suboptimal, and don't rationalize regression into progress. https://www.w3.org/wiki/Graceful_degradation_versus_progressive_enhancement https://www.w3.org/wiki/Graceful_degradation_versus_progress... Nothing really changed to make these best practices moot.