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This is a straw man argument. Randomly breaking stuff for the sake of breaking stuff is not what this is about. This update had a clear intent and only "broke t
by acobster 9y ago
This is a straw man argument. Randomly breaking stuff for the sake of breaking stuff is not what this is about. This update had a clear intent and only "broke the web" for sites running code that was already risking breakage by deploying an anti-pattern, namely blocking on scroll!
I'm no believer in Google's faux-altruism, much less sympathetic to their cause (see: AMP). The rollout could've been less agressive, sure. But I don't think equating a step towards sane default behavior with wrench-in-the-gears chaos adds much to the discussion.
- brlewis 9y agoThis is not a straw man argument. See sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15635929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15635929 It would be a straw man argument as a reply to the article, but it's a reply to a comment that advocates breaking the JS to make developers use it less.
- acobster 9y agoI think that's a mischaracterization of the comment's argument, despite its perhaps simplistic language. Maybe I'm wrong but given the context the spirit of the argument seems to be "let's load less shitty JS," i.e. less code that does stuff like block on scroll. So in my view the argument is really not about the developer experience at all; it's about encouraging code with concrete benefits for the end-user. Breaking "if" semantics is just inducing chaos to no one's benefit.
- brlewis 9y agoThere is no adjective or other qualifier in the original comment. You're reading it in. If you need more clarity, see the same commenter's "JS is a pox on the web" comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15636056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15636056