These articles always suggest that minimal HTML and jQuery is enough. Like, I guess for a blog, but like, not for web apps? That's the other weird thing - they're always framed like the entirety of the internet is blogs or whatever. How many software engineers are working on blogs? Everything is a webapp now, the vast majority of the time most users spend interacting with the internet is through complex applications like Spotify, YouTube, Gmail, Netflix, Google docs, notion, linear, etc etc etc. I guess there's an audience for complaining about react for some reason
JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
61–70 of 171 posts
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
LLMs seem to use them at a rate far higher than the average person, same with the words “delve” and “robust” (and many others)
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#63I 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…
To contrast: JS _the language_ is one of the most stable languages out there.
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#64I’m optimistic on the future. llms.txt will be adopted for all major sites (from AI hype), and ironically it will benefit humans to browse and interact with sites in a simpler manner.
I personally believe that a new era of “lite-browsers” will be made. Emacs got close into this direction, but not accessible to avg. consumers
Text oriented operating systems will be the future.
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#65Earlier 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.
Life changer for me was discovery of Scaling in iOS Safari.
125% it’s quite nice, actually. Large enough font to read.
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#66Although 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.
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Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#67JavaScript is named JavaScript because it was intended to "bridge browser and Java applets" if you read all the old press releases, they try to push the Java applet connection a lot. The original plan was to run Java applets everywhere and JavaScript as a "glue". I think we are much better off now than with Java applets. It could have been much, much worse.
Initially it was called Mocha or LiveScript and not intended to bridge Java applets. It really was invented to make HTML more dynamic. But eventually Netscape and Sun did a license agreement. Sun owned Java. From this point on, the name JavaScript was born and it was marketed to bridge browser and Java applets.
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#68I 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…
Usual arguments for "upgrading" are: * We can't hire specialists for older frameworks. * We can't generate positive hipe over older technologies. * New technologies are better, so we will deliver features faster. In reality, it's almost always resume-driven development.
It may be resume-driven, but that's the state of the world. If you fail to keep your team members and attract new ones as the team needs to grow, you are fighting a losing battle.
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#69These days you can use JavaScript-centric stack (and, gasp, React) to render static HTML that does not require runtime JavaScript at all.
Why bother with it, though?
Imagine you wanted to add elements of runtime interactivity. When we think about new and cool things on the Web, that’s nearly all of them. Ask yourself, what would result in more complexity and moving parts: doing the whole thing in one stack (e.g., JavaScript and React), or using two disparate stacks (say, Wordpress and then a bunch of jQuery) and ad-hoc tying them together by duplicating data model and business logic?
The most under-appreciated point about good design is that it’s not just about a thing looking pretty and functioning well at one point in time. It’s about a thing that can be maintained, improved, and kept in good working condition. Good design is sustainable, it exists and satisfies expectations over time.
Good developer experience is not the only aspect of sustainability (there are also cultural/organizational aspects, business model, etc.), but it is an important one. Modern stack is great from this perspective, allowing to express potentially dynamic layout while largely preserving declarativity (JSX), forcing to think about exactly what data you work with at all times so that you catch more issues at compile time (TypeScript), etc.
Yes, it also offers plenty of opportunities for shooting yourself in the foot if you so choose: by carelessly adding random badly maintained dependencies with massive dependency trees, by not thinking through the architecture or piling on abstraction layers, by adopting a framework that does not exactly fit your use case or that you don’t understand how it works, etc. We’ve all done that at some point, but ultimately it’s skill issue. More powerful tools require more thoughtful application.
Yes, sometimes sustainability can compete with the thing’s being pretty or small at one point in time, even though all of those are worthy ideals. Sometimes tradeoffs need to be made.
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#70> The result? Broken back buttons. Image bloat. Inaccessible markup. URLs that don’t behave like URLs. Metadata that disappears. Content you can’t copy. Buttons you can’t keyboard to. Modals that trap you. Scroll positions that reset for no reason. Headlines that shift mid-read. Analytics that don’t match reality. Preview environments that lie. And pages that load… eventually. -- None of that is the fault of Javascri…
> Inaccessible markup
Way too many very basic UI affordances cannot be made accessible without JS if they can be implemented at all.