While I understand the concern about bloated frontends, I do not understand the throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater mentality of JavaScript-free front-ends.

While I understand the concern about bloated frontends, I do not understand the throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater mentality of JavaScript-free front-ends. Furthermore I feel like there's a misplaced sense of pastoralism or nostalgia about the-web-before-JavaScript. The fact is there was a very brief period where the World Wide Web was both widely accessible to the public and JavaScript free. I built my first website without JavaScript in 1995. By 1997 I was building incredibly interactive single page apps in IE4 with JavaScript and DHTML (as it was called at the time). By 1998 my full time job was writing cross-browser JavaScript. That's twenty years ago folks. jQuery didn't hit the scene until 2006. Why was jQuery created? Was it a revolutionary new tool that gave us the ability to create applications that heretofore had never been seen? Or, was it created to tame the horrendous mass of JavaScript that had already accumulated? We can talk about bloat, but let's be honest about what the web browser is now. Chrome is an application container. The web hasn't been purely hypertext for a long time. Back when it was we complained about the bloat... of images