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Isn't this just going back to the 90s web? Before all the javascript and interactivity craziness was used. We can argue all day about how bad js is from a devel

Isn't this just going back to the 90s web? Before all the javascript and interactivity craziness was used. We can argue all day about how bad js is from a development perspective but I definitely like the interactivity it's brought to the web.

wwweston 2y ago
JS can do some cool things. Sometimes it's necessary. Sometimes it's the most expedient way. On the other hand, we've exported high enough complexity and code payload sizes to the front-end and seen bandwidth rise enough that it's possible for some full page reloads to beat responsiveness/interactivity of many front ends at this point. But if one doesn't want to do that, there's techniques to let JS act primarily in the controller role while letting the back end take care of model/view concerns that, exchanging HTML as an adequate data serialization and display/UI description format. And, just as importantly, as a hypertext and serialization format, it provides opportunity for machine discovery and description of available resources. The ones we're most used to are search engines, but we're obviously in an era where we're discovering what else is possible. Possible ML models can also work with JS messes, but since they're less legible for people, there's less likely a good corpus correlating accurate descriptions with code in the wild. Legibility of what you feed the client has benefits beyond executablity, something that people who grew up with the early web were apparently prepared to understand.
PittleyDunkin 2y ago
> but I definitely like the interactivity it's brought to the web. I don't! EDIT: to be earnest, I sincerely wish the web as it stands had chosen some serious distinction between "documents", "documents-with-scripting-but-no-web-requests", and "interactive applications with remote state". As it stands the last option trivially passes for the first two options.

wwweston 2y ago

JS can do some cool things. Sometimes it's necessary. Sometimes it's the most expedient way. On the other hand, we've exported high enough complexity and code payload sizes to the front-end and seen bandwidth rise enough that it's possible for some full page reloads to beat responsiveness/interactivity of many front ends at this point. But if one doesn't want to do that, there's techniques to let JS act primarily in the controller role while letting the back end take care of model/view concerns that, exchanging HTML as an adequate data serialization and display/UI description format. And, just as importantly, as a hypertext and serialization format, it provides opportunity for machine discovery and description of available resources. The ones we're most used to are search engines, but we're obviously in an era where we're discovering what else is possible. Possible ML models can also work with JS messes, but since they're less legible for people, there's less likely a good corpus correlating accurate descriptions with code in the wild. Legibility of what you feed the client has benefits beyond executablity, something that people who grew up with the early web were apparently prepared to understand.

PittleyDunkin 2y ago

> but I definitely like the interactivity it's brought to the web. I don't! EDIT: to be earnest, I sincerely wish the web as it stands had chosen some serious distinction between "documents", "documents-with-scripting-but-no-web-requests", and "interactive applications with remote state". As it stands the last option trivially passes for the first two options.