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JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

jonoalderson.com

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Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

#41

Post by potato-peeler »

Language wars tend to get emotional, as clearly suggested by other commenters.

I think the problem is exasperated when developers can’t put emotion aside and recognise issues, it may be as simple as proper training or choosing the proper tools.

But just objectively looking at the point the author is making, he is right.

Case in point, Indiscriminate use of frameworks have made the web bloated. In fact, I bet half the Links posted in HN won’t even open in slightly older browsers.

But the content they post are interesting. It is not a question of skill, as other commenters here want to point out.

So it seems to argue that these people just don’t care about accessibility or coverage of the tools they use.

Empathy is key. One should be conscious towards their audience, since web is open and far reaching. It is not just a group of developers in their near vicinity or latest conference hosted in a tech city, they should care about.

If you are building something, one should carefully evaluate the tools they use and how it will end up getting consumed by a wide demography of end consumers, who don’t have the same machine as they do.

Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

#42

Post by mschuster91 »

onion2k wrote: post #7

Saying JS broke the web when your website loads 754kB of JS across 13 separate requests makes me wonder if you're very serious about the problem.

On a wired connection? No problem. On a crowded mobile network? Or when you got only EDGE (hello Germany)? Whoops.

Hacker News however? Blazing fast - one page and only the CSS is actually required for rendering the page, and it is using both a cache-buster in the URL and a 10 year (!) cache life time. The JS uses the same as well but it's only loaded at the end of the page, so after rendering is done.

Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

#43

Post by gf000 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #42
onion2k wrote: post #7

Saying JS broke the web when your website loads 754kB of JS across 13 separate requests makes me wonder if you're very serious about the problem.

On a wired connection? No problem. On a crowded mobile network? Or when you got only EDGE (hello Germany)? Whoops. Hacker News however? Blazing fast - one page and only the CSS is actually required for rendering the page, and it is using both a cache-buster in the URL and a 10 year (!) cache life time. The JS uses the same as well but it's only loaded at the end of the page, so after rendering is done.

> Hacker News however?

While being completely useless on mobile, with tiny buttons and textarea, which could be fixed while barely making the whole thing larger.

Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

#44

Post by CreepGin »

Sophira wrote: post #37

Although I agree that JS is being used incredibly irresponsibly, I also think this article is almost certainly AI-generated with minimal editing based on the way it reads, and I wish that wasn't the case because the topic deserves better than this. [Edit: Although I recognise that em dashes are what a lot of people use to identify AI-generated text, that isn't what I was doing here. I hadn't even been considering the…

Holy s@#$! You're right. I didn't catch it at first, probably because it was on the HN frontpage. But yeah, the amount of em dashes (among other things) totally gives it away.

There were so many contradictions in the article, I was going to point them out. Don't see a point now.

Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

#45

Post by ale42 »

gf000 wrote: post #43
mschuster91 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a wired connection? No problem. On a crowded mobile network? Or when you got only EDGE (hello Germany)? Whoops. Hacker News however? Blazing fast - one page and only the CSS is actually required for rendering the page, and it is using both a cache-buster in the URL and a 10 year (!) cache life time. The JS uses the same as well but it's only loaded at the end of the page, so after rendering is done.

> Hacker News however? While being completely useless on mobile, with tiny buttons and textarea, which could be fixed while barely making the whole thing larger.

That's not a JS problem. It's a UI problem and you mostly solve it with CSS and adapting the HTML, you don't need to add a 3 MB JS framework for that.

Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

#47

Post by Springtime »

onion2k wrote: post #7

Saying JS broke the web when your website loads 754kB of JS across 13 separate requests makes me wonder if you're very serious about the problem.

Their site loads fine without JS or cookies/local storage enabled though, which is more than can be said of many sites (and tbh what I was expecting the article to be about given the dramatic headline).

Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

#48

Post by kitten_mittens_ »

CreepGin wrote: post #44
Sophira wrote: post #37

Although I agree that JS is being used incredibly irresponsibly, I also think this article is almost certainly AI-generated with minimal editing based on the way it reads, and I wish that wasn't the case because the topic deserves better than this. [Edit: Although I recognise that em dashes are what a lot of people use to identify AI-generated text, that isn't what I was doing here. I hadn't even been considering the…

Holy s@#$! You're right. I didn't catch it at first, probably because it was on the HN frontpage. But yeah, the amount of em dashes (among other things) totally gives it away. There were so many contradictions in the article, I was going to point them out. Don't see a point now.

Why are em dashes a giveaway? They’re auto inserted on Windows for two hyphens still, aren’t they?

Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

#49

Post by vachina »

gf000 wrote: post #43
mschuster91 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a wired connection? No problem. On a crowded mobile network? Or when you got only EDGE (hello Germany)? Whoops. Hacker News however? Blazing fast - one page and only the CSS is actually required for rendering the page, and it is using both a cache-buster in the URL and a 10 year (!) cache life time. The JS uses the same as well but it's only loaded at the end of the page, so after rendering is done.

> Hacker News however? While being completely useless on mobile, with tiny buttons and textarea, which could be fixed while barely making the whole thing larger.

Hacker news is perfect on mobile. How often do you vote? It is so content dense it’s perfect for mobile.

Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

#50

Post by al_borland »

Lapz wrote: post #15

I often see people say “JS is unstable,you’re always rewriting your code for the latest and greatest framework” and I always wonder where do you work? If I told the people I report to I can’t deliver that for you because we’re rewriting the app, I’d be out of the door soon. The JS ecosystem is like any technology ecosystem, things change over time but you don’t have to chase the trends, be pragmatic about what you fo…

The people I report to are the ones telling me to rewrite the same thing every other year on a new platform and stack. It drives me mad. Challenging these ideas risks my job.

For things they don’t care about, I am using very basic tools that have worked for the last 10+ years and will likely work fine for the next 20 years. This allows me to solve new problems instead of continuing to solve the same problem over again. At least that’s my goal. In reality, it allows the tools I need (but management doesn’t care about) to “just work”, freeing me up to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic for them. All of this is for internal tools. We’re just raising operating costs on things that have 0 impact on revenue. I don’t really understand the vision.

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