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Exactly my thoughts. JavaScript has made the web a powerful platforms, which otherwise would have been infested with proprietary technologies like Flash, XAML,

Exactly my thoughts. JavaScript has made the web a powerful platforms, which otherwise would have been infested with proprietary technologies like Flash, XAML, Applets etc., Because of what JavaScript brings on to the table, today we can think of building application on par with native applications. Bashing of JavaScript is unwarranted.

Seirdy 6y ago
Not all sites should leverage the features of this "powerful platform." A blog doesn't need to be an app. Every piece of complexity you add to something has a cost. Here's a list of ways people consume web content besides the web browsers most webdevs test on: - A phone in a train entering a tunnel. HTML loaded, but nothing else. - A computer on shared hotel Wi-Fi with a packet loss rate of 70%. - A browser with an addon that applies a dark theme to web pages by injecting a stylesheet - A browser with default background/foreground colors that aren't white/black - Braille readers - Screen readers - E-readers and webpage-to-epub converters - Browser reader-mode, or a host of 3rd-party reader-mode addons - Bookmarking services with article extractors (e.g. Pocket) - RSS readers - Printouts - Textual browsers: lynx, links, elinks, w3m - An old computer in the public library, running Firefox 23 - A niche OS with a custom browser you've never heard of - A browser that won't exist until the year 2028 - A mobile app you've never heard of - A link aggregator that displays previews of articles - A custom script that converts HTML to markdown and saves the markdown file for offline reading. Each of these is an edge case. Yet most users fit into a few edge cases. I have yet to meet a single person who isn't often inconvenienced by being an edge case. A simple site that uses HTML with some CSS properly automatically gets stellar cross-browser compatibility and accessibility. My site works well on everything from Firefox to lynx to screenreaders (I don't have a braille reader to test, but I suspect it should work well on one), and I didn't even have to try. If your train goes through a tunnel and only HTML loads, it'll still look just fine; CSS is an optional progressive enhancement. Every piece of tech you throw at a site makes some edge case fail. If there are multiple ways to deliver the features we need, we should choose the one that's the simplest, to avoid excluding more edge cases. If your website is a blog with formatted text, there's no reason to add JS and throw out all the edge cases that this could exclude. TLDR: Don't build a gingerbread house with construction equipment. Plenty of sites don't need to use future tech.

Seirdy 6y ago

Not all sites should leverage the features of this "powerful platform." A blog doesn't need to be an app. Every piece of complexity you add to something has a cost. Here's a list of ways people consume web content besides the web browsers most webdevs test on: - A phone in a train entering a tunnel. HTML loaded, but nothing else. - A computer on shared hotel Wi-Fi with a packet loss rate of 70%. - A browser with an addon that applies a dark theme to web pages by injecting a stylesheet - A browser with default background/foreground colors that aren't white/black - Braille readers - Screen readers - E-readers and webpage-to-epub converters - Browser reader-mode, or a host of 3rd-party reader-mode addons - Bookmarking services with article extractors (e.g. Pocket) - RSS readers - Printouts - Textual browsers: lynx, links, elinks, w3m - An old computer in the public library, running Firefox 23 - A niche OS with a custom browser you've never heard of - A browser that won't exist until the year 2028 - A mobile app you've never heard of - A link aggregator that displays previews of articles - A custom script that converts HTML to markdown and saves the markdown file for offline reading. Each of these is an edge case. Yet most users fit into a few edge cases. I have yet to meet a single person who isn't often inconvenienced by being an edge case. A simple site that uses HTML with some CSS properly automatically gets stellar cross-browser compatibility and accessibility. My site works well on everything from Firefox to lynx to screenreaders (I don't have a braille reader to test, but I suspect it should work well on one), and I didn't even have to try. If your train goes through a tunnel and only HTML loads, it'll still look just fine; CSS is an optional progressive enhancement. Every piece of tech you throw at a site makes some edge case fail. If there are multiple ways to deliver the features we need, we should choose the one that's the simplest, to avoid excluding more edge cases. If your website is a blog with formatted text, there's no reason to add JS and throw out all the edge cases that this could exclude. TLDR: Don't build a gingerbread house with construction equipment. Plenty of sites don't need to use future tech.