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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 fu
by 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 agoThat’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.