The old web placed HTML and CSS as primary, and used JS for incidental tasks like form validation, or fixing up the back button. The big idea was "graceful degr

The old web placed HTML and CSS as primary, and used JS for incidental tasks like form validation, or fixing up the back button. The big idea was "graceful degradation": sites were expected to work without JS, at the cost of (say) a server-side error instead of immediate feedback. Modern reddit does not gracefully degrade: it requires JS to click buttons, to load images, to scroll, etc. Old reddit still works well without JS. So does Google for that matter.