4 ms·

Not sure the experience on failures of PHP scripts of that time was any better :)

• acdha 1y ago
  Every alternative was massively better for two key reasons: the first is that it happened on the server where you knew about it and could control what happened[1], and because you only had one kind of server to monitor whereas client side errors had to be tested in a wide range of client OS and browser combinations, much larger than today where automatic updates are just taken for granted. There was a third way in which PHP was often better: continuing after errors has drawbacks from a security and correctness perspective but as a user it was often the case that you could read what you wanted on a partially functioning page. I think we’ve largely matured out of the point where that’s good, but people often did benefit at the time. 1. remember, this was before things like Sentry happened for front end error collection, and XML-related issues still can’t be handled by JavaScript even now.