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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)

#71

Post by vladms »

Taek wrote: post #18
hakanderyal wrote: post #14

> 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…

Javascript is a platform that gave developers the ability to modify the core UX of web browsers. That's a platform problem, not a builders problem - if you don't want crappy apps on the web that break things, then don't give developers the power to break things.

I find this a strange way of thinking on a site called "hacker" news...

In my opinion there is NO problem. We have powerful tools that give you freedom and the possibility of tinkering. Some people will use it in ways one doesn't like, but as long as you have some possibility to use other products I think it is great.

I wouldn't trust anybody (including myself) to decide for all others what are the powers that should be given or not. The web architecture is amazing exactly because it allows everybody to build without some large body/organization/company imposing most rules.

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

#72

Post by gherkinnn »

helloguillecl wrote: post #38
hakanderyal wrote: post #14

> 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…

The problem is that getting those things right is 4x more difficult in a SPA app than a legacy, server rendered, app. - No native back and forward button implementation. Now you must listen to an API and emulate the legacy behaviour. - The concept of links, its also emulated via onClick events. This means that anything can be a link, so in many cases rows become links and their content is not really selectable as tex…

The problem is that it is at least 4x easier get everything wrong using an SPA.

All the SPA frameworks handle browser history and links correctly.

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

#75

Post by efitz »

I don’t think that the issue is that we changed to designing web sites for developers. I think that the problem is that we started designing web sites for monetization. And this required adding a language and ecosystem that far exceeded the capabilities of the original WWW hypertext vision.

Ad based monetization means that there are going to be all sorts of business requirements to optimize for the monetization case: detailed surveillance metrics, various design requirements related to branding and to fulfill the designers’ “vision“, paywalls allowing search engines to peek through, etc. oh, and a chat assistant, preferably AI powered, because OMG why would we possibly expend the resources to communicate with a customer.

Ad based monetization is just evil; 50 years from now people will look back on the last couple of decades as a lesson on what not to do. It’s not that ads are evil or that monetization is evil, it’s that optimizing the web for ad based monetization causes people to do so many things that are bad for humans.

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

#76

Post by neya »

In 2010, Facebook was one of the best websites to browse. It was everything you wanted a central social media platform to be. You could stay updated about your friends, family and even host pages for your business on it. Everything was just so simple - because they respected what a "hyperlink" actually meant.

Fast forward today, I click on a dropdown on a post with barely 3-4 options, there's a spinner, a dozen requests in the network panel and the menu doesn't even load and gives up. Frontend libraries like React made frontend so needlessly complex that they actually ended up killing the definition of what a hyperlink is.

You click on a link today, it can either take you to where it's supposed to take you, open a dozen random popups or wipe your bank account clean. I miss the good old 2000s era where JS was minimal and the focus was on HYPER TEXT in HTML. We had good content, less frontend complexity. And we had flash for everything else.

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

#77

Post by eadmund »

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.

> the amount of em dashes

… means absolutely nothing. I’ve been heavily using them for decades at this point.

The article itself may or may not be AI-generated, but we cannot penalise folks for simply using a stylish bit of punctuation.

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

#78

Post by serial_dev »

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.

> This isn’t about going back to table layouts or banning JavaScript. It’s about building with intent. > It’s not about purity. It’s about outcomes. > Use what works.

I think the website is fast and the majority of that JS is for the comment section+recaptcha (that's also for comments?), website works without it, I can tab through things, and the site is accessible, so I don't think that hundred KB of JS is a big "gotcha!".

However, considering barely any comments, I'd honestly just consider removing them, not because I' mind the couple of hundred KBs, but because nobody uses these anymore. All discussion happens on social platforms and forums.

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

#79

Post by rossant »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #27

The problem is the web sucks. CSS sucks. HTML sucks. Javascript is perfectly fine, actually. Browser security sucks. CORS sucks. CSP sucks. SVG sucks. Favicons suck. Shadow DOM sucks. Video controls suck. Web audio sucks. WebGPU sucks. W3C sucks. Chromium sucks. You know what I'd do to be able to build a website using SwiftUI or GTK? Given the terribleness of the web, naturally people will use bloated UI frameworks a…

Can't articulate how much sarcasm there is in this comment.
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