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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)

#91

Post by Sophira »

CreepGin wrote: post #82
ale42 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to be an AI to use em-dashes. I actually use them quite a lot (even outside of Word) and AFAIK I am not an AI. I just care about text layout and proper use of characters. — is Alt-0151 on Windows (ok you need a keyboard with numeric pad).

Well, you may need to worry about them now. It's a well-known issue with the mainstream LLMs. Every few days, you see a new post on reddit from people asking how to get rid of em dashes from ChatGPT, etc. Even when they are not a telltale-sign, folks are afraid of using them now because of AI. I'm not saying em dashes are bad. Our books are littered with them, and that's why LLMs spit them out consistently. https://m…

The funny thing is, I wasn't even thinking about the em dashes when I made the initial comment. I had been concentrating on the usage of English in general in the article, which to me is a far more obvious sign of AI generation than the usage of em dashes is.

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

#92

Post by anonzzzies »

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 seems to attract the most horrible frameworks that stimulate this more than in other languages, but agreed, not the fault of the language. It's a horrible language as well, but that's another story.

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

#93

Post by brushfoot »

> This isn’t evolution. It’s self-inflicted complexity.

> This isn’t accidental. It’s cultural.

> We’re not innovating. We’re rebuilding broken versions of tools the web already gave us – and doing it badly.

> We’re not iterating toward impact – we’re iterating just to stay afloat.

It's not X, it's Y? Dashes? Question fragments? This style isn't just tedious—it's a hallmark of LLM-generated content.

The whole article feels like low-effort LLM-generated clickbait to fan the eternal flamewar between web developers and web app developers. Yes, you might not need React for a static blog. Yes, React is useful for writing web applications. Can we talk about something else now?

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

#94

Post by glutamate »

jxjnskkzxxhx wrote: post #28
glutamate wrote: post #6

> Spoiler alert: we didn’t get app-like performance. We didn’t get better user experiences. Not sure about that, I'll take Gmail and fastmail any day over outlook and evolution

Is your problem with outlook specifically or with email apps in general? Wanna tell us more about it?

the main reasons for my preference are that: gmail/fastmail are simple, I can use from multiple computers easily, have good defaults and most importantly, they almost always work. Outlook users seem to constantly have something broken.

I do realise that i am reaping the benefits of a centralised system, and in the case of gmail, monetised by advertising, surveillance and user lock-in. Probably the ideal for me would would be a self-hosted web client, e.g. Mailcow

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

#95

Post by ffsm8 »

ale42 wrote: post #45
gf000 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Maybe we can do the fotm and instead generate it on the fly via an LLM?

Each user can get their own stylesheet and every request will be a small surprise how it looks.

Fantastic idea, right? No? Always these haters...

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

#96

Post by immibis »

wffurr wrote: post #59
vladms wrote: post #36

While I don't agree with other points, things got clearer once I reached the following: > Marketers, content editors, SEOs, designers – they’re all locked out of the process. Because now, even simple tasks require technical fluency. I worked in web development in the 2000s and then restarted in 2020s. The power of the tools, the speed of development and the result are all much better. The downside? You need to know m…

The fast pocket computer might be fairly common in fully developed countries, but bandwidth is not. It’s trivial to run into use cases with limited network bandwidth regardless of how fast your iPhone is. And if you broaden your idea of your user base a bit, even the fast computers aren’t ubiquitous. Try using a low end Android phone sometime, or a hand me down iOS device still on iOS 12.

A low-end Android phone that is 100 times as fast as a Cray 1, yet still can't load a blog post.

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

#97

Post by dgb23 »

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…

The separation of HTML and CSS is almost entirely arbitrary, which makes web development unnecessarily complex and requires way too much discipline to do right.

I disagree with SVG though. The format has a lot of problems when you look closely, but in principle it's great and there are a lot of benefits that you get from using it.

The main issue i have is that HTML itself stagnated. We still lack extremely basic UI components.

> Javascript is perfectly fine, actually.

The direction of JS went the wrong way quite a while ago. Keywords like class, let, const and import all break the dynamic nature of JS and the utility thereof.

When these things were decided, there was apparently nobody in the room who asked "Wait, what is the point of having a dynamic language again?"

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

#98

Post by immibis »

farseer wrote: post #5

That is because the actual alternatives to JS such as Flash, Silverlight and Java Applets were much worse. Native apps are bound by the platform's walled garden and practically undiscoverable, hence the need for web apps.

Native apps. Plain HTML (sometimes with server-side apps). When Javascript was becoming a problem, native apps weren't yet the lock-in ecosystem they were today; arguably that ecosystem is only possible because everything became a web app first.

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

#99

Post by immibis »

vikramkr wrote: post #61

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…

You might not be able to make your web app with zero, but chances are it needs a lot less.

Look at Old Reddit for example; it used Javascript for inline comment reply textboxes and for expanding sections of the tree. With it turned off, everything else still worked. Of course, that's gone now.

Do you really need three megabytes of JS to replace the whole page with the video player when I click on a video, or is enough?

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