6 ms·

worst thing ever happened to web

• phatskat 3y ago
  How so?
  • mihaic 3y ago
    It's the generic HN snark that pushes for no JS websites for everything, without considering the benefits of users having such a powerful VM that probably protected them from running random executables.
    • flangola7 3y ago
      You shouldn't be running random executables period. At one time people still had the common sense not to run code they wasn't vetted and that they trusted.
      • quickthrower2 3y ago
        You run random executables via RPC when you use the web anyway, and that code runs on the server. The problem with JS in browser has been security, specifically cross origin not that JS is code
      • zweifuss 3y ago
        Your definition of common sense is not really common. Flash, for example, was one of the very early use cases of an ActiveX control. This unsafe technology was supported by Internet Explorer until the end. The IE11 engine is still an installable part of Windows 11. Netscape Navigator plug-ins also were binary code modules. NPAPI was supported by Google Chrome until 2015. There were warnings from the beginning (both with ActiveX and NPAPI), but for most engineers, getting things done took precedence over trust issues. Youtube, for example, would not have been possible until much later without Flash.
        • flangola7 3y ago
          Flash is one example of the problems of this new attitude, yes.
      • foul 3y ago
        In Windows-land and seldom elsewhere, it was more like "don't run random executables and don't open attachments and ask a sysadmin about the site/flash page/applet you're about to visit". I dare you to ask your grandma what is a .vbs file, without googling...
      • mihaic 3y ago
        We both know that, but then came the users that opened CoolPic.jpeg.exe and installed wallpaper packages from .ru domains. I honestly can't see a much better compromise than JS to include the common users.
      • tinus_hn 3y ago
        When was that time? Was it before open source was invented? Or was it when viruses were running rampantly?
      • krger 3y ago
        We no longer live in the era where the only people who use hardware that runs executables are philosopher kings with the capability of vetting them by looking at the code.
      • bee_rider 3y ago
        It was not really common sense. Most people ran all sorts of random codes. If they didn’t, it was because they didn’t know how to get online to find all the good viruses. But, it was easier to avoid this common error before every site depended on it.
      • phatskat 3y ago
        > At one time people still had the common sense not to run code they wasn't vetted and that they trusted. At one time? When? People have been executing arbitrary and malicious code since the moment they could share it between two computers.
    • tannhaeuser 3y ago
      OTOH, your's is the stereotypical response from an HNer blindly pushing for developer convenience without considering the benefits and drastic power shift away from the user getting just static document data sent vs yet another VM environment to do what desktop apps are already doing, badly ;)
    • Dalewyn 3y ago
      My web development practices were nurtured in the late 90s and early 00s. Back then JavaScript was to be used solely for non-critical, nice-to-have optional functionality that would regardless not inhibit the user; using JavaScript was contingent on your website gracefully falling back to a perfectly usable state in its absense. If your page failed to load without JavaScript, you were doing it wrong. If your JavaScript hassled your users, you were doing it wrong. I lament that that philosophy got thrown out the window some time in the early 2010s, which subsequently led to the hellscape of websites filled to its armpits with JavaShit that serve no good purpose which we see today.
      • phatskat 3y ago
        That’s a bit of a rosy take of the web of the 90’s-00’s. Plenty of sites failed to render without JS, they just had a noscript tag that said “this site requires JavaScript”. Graceful degradation was ideal but often too much for sites that either weren’t small enough or who didn’t have the resources to implement it. If you were adding JS to a preexisting site, it was easier to do, but on a fresh build or redesign, timelines often meant some things just wouldn’t work but hopefully you could still navigate pages. With the rise of mobile browsers, the ability for frameworks to solve cross-browser comparability, and the general acceptance that anything beyond trivial interaction required JS, catering to a tiny crowd that didn’t like having it turned on became very unimportant to most. I do agree that graceful degradation to a state that’s still functional is ideal and something I wish had stuck around.
    • foul 3y ago
      Probably it's the generic HN snark in revolt against the modern365 world, but the http/html/js kludge has been so effective and malleable that killed a lot of thriving cyberspaces (and for some it killed dialogue and public opinion entirely). But i'm sure the human race will outlive the web 2/3/4 circus.
  • anticodon 3y ago
    Javascript is a constant reinvent of the wheel. Sites had become much bigger and much slower contrary to JS crowd promises. Development is a devilish entanglement of tens of thousands of tiny libraries, and almost every one of them is changing several times a day. I do not do frontend programming now, but I see how slow it became compared to the old good Web 1.0. Monster frameworks that require changing hundreds of files daily, sometimes front development is behind backend development because of this burden and cognitive load. And one fact which annoys me the most: in all other areas we are free to choose any language to do the job. But in the web we're forever stuck with one language which was quickly concocted in a few days and still to this day many of the original flaws remain.
    • zogrodea 3y ago
      I'm not a fan of JS myself in all honesty (just not my favourite language to code in), but I think your first point is more about front-end dev culture than flaws inherent to the language itself. An alternative world could have existed where we have the same exact Javascript, without the culture of using "tens of thousands of tiny libraries" which change "several times a day". It was possible to avoid these faults while still keeping the language itself. So I think it's unfair to say (as the comment you agreed with said) that Javascript is the worst thing to happen to the web, because all the cognitive load being pointed to comes from widespread human usage of the language rather than the language itself. That's on us.
      • Dalewyn 3y ago
        Personally, I distinguish the culture of using tens of thousands of frameworks from JavaScript the scripting language by calling it all collectively JavaShit. JavaScript is fine, but JavaShit and everyone who partakes in it are a plague.
    • patates 3y ago
      > Sites had become much bigger and much slower contrary to JS crowd promises Where are those people promising slimmer and faster websites compared to absolute no JS? > Development is a devilish entanglement of tens of thousands of tiny libraries, and almost every one of them is changing several times a day Nothing to do with JS. Many libraries is a symptom of popularity and them being tiny is caused by trying (unsuccessfully though) to send the absolute minimum over the wire. > I see how slow it became compared to the old good Web 1.0. Monster frameworks that require changing hundreds of files daily What web 1.0 was doing is completely different to what the current JS apps are doing. Good luck implementing Figma with the good old web 1.0. I'd even say good luck implementing it anything other than the current web-app dev stack or some custom native UI library which would take a millennia to develop. > sometimes front development is behind backend development because of this burden and cognitive load backend and frontend dev have completely different constraints. Doing frontend dev for a native app is also cognitively nearly completely different monster. > in all other areas we are free to choose any language to do the job. But in the web we're forever stuck with one language I mean you could always compile to JS and these days there are many good webassembly frameworks. > still to this day many of the original flaws remain But also almost always easy to avoid. It's a necessary evil for backward compatibility.
  • skeletal88 3y ago
    The language is only popular because it has a monopoly in the browser, there are no alternatives to JS. We are all held hostage by it.
    • phatskat 3y ago
      There was a time when there were options and they died out because they weren’t as popular. VBScript and JScript to name a couple. Java is still around but I haven’t seen an applet in probably over a decade. Flash was a thing.
      • mcpar-land 3y ago
        Never forget that the killshot to the back of Flash's head wasn't the technology itself being bad, but Apple's total refusal to support it on iPhones. Now the only thing keeping an entire generation worth of games alive is the Flashpoint Archive.
        • phatskat 3y ago
          As much as I miss Newgrounds and grew up with Flash games, and used Flash for lots of art projects, it needed to go. The list of high score CVEs for Flash is 74 with a CVE score of 9 or higher. A decent number were exploits that made use of being able to execute code. I don’t blame Apple for that decision, honestly. And I’m sure security wasn’t apple’s only reason of course, I’m not going to be naive about that. All around, we may be better off without it. It will also be missed - both can be true.
    • b3n 3y ago
      But there's plenty of transpilers: ClojureScript, Nim, etc.
• intelVISA 3y ago
  SWE in general too!