I agree - it's still perfectly possible to design clear, attractive (and perfectly functional) websites with just HTML and CSS (and maybe a little bit of Javasc

I agree - it's still perfectly possible to design clear, attractive (and perfectly functional) websites with just HTML and CSS (and maybe a little bit of Javascript). The page weight of even simple-looking sites (like a blog post on medium.com) is surprising large (admittedly, probably not due to Javascript but due to web fonts). I personally really like the use of web fonts. Using a service like Fontsquirrel, and limiting the number of font weights you use (regular, medium, italic etc), you can optimise the font file size to be smaller than what Google serves up through their font service. I'd say to the original poster: if you really want to experience whether Javascript is slowing down the internet, try browsing popular sites with Javascript disabled (use an add-on like noscript on Firefox). You can judge for yourself how much faster browsing the web feels. See how many sites break, and then, when you enable Javascript, ask yourself if those same sites could work perfectly fine without Javascript or with minimal Javascript. If you try running a browser session with Javascript disabled, not only do many sites break (as expected), but plenty of sites serving plain text articles simply won't display their content either[1]. HTML is designed for plain text content, why do we want to wrap it up in Javascript? The rise of Javascript frameworks like meteor is exacerbating this trend. Some developers are using these frameworks for outputting everything to the web whether it's a list of links or a plain text blog page. Do we really want to go down this path? Some sites load fast whether Javascript is enabled or not, but for me, the question of whether Javascript is slowing down sites is closely bound up with the question of whether Javascript is needed for everything on the site in the first place. [1] As an aside, try viewing the Official Android blog from Google with Javascript disabled and you get a blank page. When enabled you get a blog site that could easily be rendered in plain HTML and CSS. http://officialandroid.blogspot.co.uk/ http://officialandroid.blogspot.co.uk/