> I disagree with this completely. So much of what JS does is increase the (perceived) speed and sanity of the user experience. For example, in a scriptless wor

> I disagree with this completely. So much of what JS does is increase the (perceived) speed and sanity of the user experience. For example, in a scriptless world, your HN up/down vote can't be done without a full page load, which would come with the added headache of changing the state of the world on your page because stories and comments have changed their ordering. Solution? Return of the chronological thread (no thanks). Counterpoint: when JS/Ajax-free versions of sites are available, they're usually faster in practice. Gmail, Google Calendar. Tried them in their low- to no-AJAX versions lately? I use basic HTML gmail because I got friggin' sick of how slow AJAXy gmail and Inbox were on my stupid-fast MacBook. For the specific case of upvotes on HN, IIRC this would be solvable with the appropriate 2xx response (I forget which), signaling success but not triggering a page load, without requiring any modification to current web clients. Obviously this hypothetical user-focused web successor would be well served by more flexible linking options (more method support, mostly) and built-in form capabilities—which happen to be things the current web really ought to have too, for that matter—but I don't think HTTP itself would need to change. IMO email and chat with notifications and such belong in their own programs, if you want stuff like live notifications instead of a static page. I'd rather bloat and code that can communicate with the outside world when I haven't specifically told it to not be included with my document browser, because it makes every operation on said browser slower, (way) less safe, and less predictable. Or hey, how about RSS/Atom for new mail notifications? > I don't know if you are old enough to remember webmail when the refresh button was how you checked for new mail. I was on the web well before Gmail existed, so yes, I remember the bad old days of webmail before AJAX. Most of the improvements we've seen in it would be served about as well by smarter, better client-provided form elements, and some other, smaller modifications to the client side, save update pushes. I don't think what we've gained from mixing traditional web stuff with the huge set of things a page might now do to/for you with Javascript and CSS has been even close worth the cost in trust, security, privacy, and predicability. Quarantine that stuff somewhere else, plzkthx.