If I'm on reddit and had to reload the page for every upvote/downvote, comment expand/collapse, show more comments, and reply the ux would be significantly worse. And thats not even a site that has that much user interaction.
Elbowing JavaScript out
31–40 of 100 posts
Re: Elbowing JavaScript out
#32Could someone link to examples of her work? The article reads as if it's more of a fashionable contrarianism, mostly for the sake of it. I would like to experience her work in detail tho. Sadly, a clever name like 'Amy G Dala' fools google and doesn't turn up anything.
Re: Elbowing JavaScript out
#33To me as someone who writes a simple web app in Flask from time to time, web with and without JS feels like two orthogonal approaches. Without JS, you're just wrapping your data on the server in some nice html and sending it to render. With JS, you're building a client-side app that is using your server API to get the data and render it.
Re: Elbowing JavaScript out
#34Re: Elbowing JavaScript out
#35is "Amy G Dala" a fake name? I put it in google and got
"The amygdala is an almond-shaped structure in the brain".
Coincidence?
Re: Elbowing JavaScript out
#36Yes! Do use reddit and craigslist. Vote up some stories. Peruse some comments, maybe collapse the threads you don't find interesting. Do a search and see craigslist fill in potential matches for you. Hunt for places to live and notice that it gives you a nice map you can zoom and pan with.
Oh, weird, that stuff uses JS. Huh.
Re: Elbowing JavaScript out
#37is "Amy G Dala" a fake name? I put it in google and got "The amygdala is an almond-shaped structure in the brain". Coincidence?
Of course it's not a coincidence. It's some pen name of some author trying to be clever while chuckling to themselves about their high-brow inside joke.
Re: Elbowing JavaScript out
#38>Then observe how much javascript it actually used. It’s used a ton because we have been given the tool, and in having this tool, we use it.
I'm not convinced of this reasoning. I think computing history has shown repeatedly that many ideals of declarative purity will give way to something that becomes Turing Complete. (E.g. config files with IF-THEN/GOTO[1], SQL that includes "stored procedures" with loops, TeX typesetting language adds Turing-Complete programmability[2], etc)
Thought experiment... imagine a different starting point of browsers where there was only HTML/CSS but no Javascript engine. Wouldn't the pent up desire for some "programmability" in web pages eventually lead one of the browser vendors to add new HTML "logic" tags that have if/else/goto/loop? Or a vendor adds CSS "extensions" with eventual Turing Complete power? Once one browser adds it, the others copy it and we have the same situation of "program code" on the client browser. Maintaining 25 years of no programming logic power on browsers since the 1990s Mosaic browser does not seem realistic. In other words, if it wasn't Brendan Eich's Javascript to dynamically mess with the webpages, it would have eventually been something else to provide similar powers.
>The page loads, then, afterward, you tell some scripts in the footer to observe the presentation in this pristine state, then to go around and mess about with it. Is there any other place in the stack where we architect code to work like this?
I don't know what is meant by "other place in the stack" but in the wider computing world, MS Windows Forms (WinForms) works like this. You have ".frm" files with the "declarative" widget placements and then C#/VB code that can hide/unhide, resize, add GUI elements, etc. Other GUI toolkits (C++ Qt) work the same way.
>But the frontend? So I’d agree that it’s here to stay. But I don’t think we have to embrace it for all web stuff as much as we have.
With mobile phones and many desktops experiencing 100ms to 500ms network latency, what's the alternative? If a web surfer updates a shopping cart from quantity of 2 to 3, is it really the best practice to have the server rebuild the entire page and resend the result of "subtotal=price x quantity" to the client just so we maintain ideological purity of no Javascript on the web browser? Most users would find the constant page refreshes to be sluggish and not user-friendly.
[1]http://stackoverflow.com/questions/648246/at-what-point-does...
[2]Donald Knuth: http://maps.aanhet.net/maps/pdf/16_15.pdf
excerpt: In the 70s, I had a negative reaction to systems that tried to be all things to all people. Every system I looked at had its own universal Turing machine built into it somehow, and everybody’s was a little different from everybody else’s. So I thought, “Well, I’m not going to design a programming language; I wanted to have just a typesetting language.” Little by little, I needed more features and so the programming constructs grew. Guy Steele began lobbying for more capabilities early on, and I put many such things into the second version of TEX, TEX82, because of his urging. That made it possible to calculate prime numbers as well as do complicated things with page layout and figure placements.
Re: Elbowing JavaScript out
#39The page loads, then, afterward, you tell some scripts in the footer to observe the presentation in this pristine state, then to go around and mess about with it. This is why with React-style views[1] I feel like I'm finally learning how to write web applications. The DOM is always in a pristine state. [1] Specifically I'm using Mithril, but the architecture is the same in React, and similar now in Ember.
I just wanted to echo this sentiment. I also had a similar "aha" moment when a colleague introduce me to React, whereas prior to that I had invariably hacked interfaces together with very ad-hoc jQuery code. Since backend code is my bread and butter, my intuitions never had a chance to develop beyond "this feels error-prone and wrong" on their own.
Further paralleling your own journey, I now reach for Mithril first too, and I can't recommend it enough.
Re: Elbowing JavaScript out
#40The worst part of JavaScript is that the relevant committee is simply failing to acknowledge that there are lots of bright computer language designers out there who'd love to have a chance to bring their creations to the web.
Doesn't WebAssembly allow them to bring their creations to the web?
Maybe, someday. The current course will only allow for statically typed languages, and does not allow direct dom access.