Progressive Enhancement Is Dead • Hacker News Board

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#11

Post by thezilch » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 7:32 PM UTC

What I’ve found, counter-intuitively, is that apps that embrace JavaScript actually end up having less JavaScript. Yeah, I know, it’s some Zen koan shit. But the numbers speak for themselves.

The author does very little to support his claims. The Boston Globe page also has lot of scripts to support advertising and the advertising itself. As well, entirely different engineering teams and probably cultures. There's not even any research into The Boston Globe's use of progressive JS; it makes ZERO sense why the two homepages could not have the same JS footprint, with The Boston Globe continuing to work and Bustle continuing to not work, while JS is disabled.

I'm all for not supporting progressive JS; Bustle is certainly within their right to not work without JS; the author is just caught in a confirmation-bias bubble. His conclusions don't make sense; our intuitions are right; it doesn't take [much] more JS to progressively enhance a site.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#12

Post by EGreg » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 7:32 PM UTC

Javascript is great for making more efficient sites. Here's why:

1) Static resources can be cached on a CDN and composited on the client instead of an overloaded app server

2) You can load data instead of heavy and repetitive HTML over the wire

3) You can cache the data in the client and re-use it later, making for snappier interfaces

That said, you have to watch out for URLs. Just because you can write everything with javascript doesn't mean you should break URLs. And of course, crawlers other than google's crawler will probably not be able to execute your JS.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#13

Post by mmastrac » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 7:32 PM UTC

Pinckney wrote: post #3

I think the point that's overlooked here is that the offenders aren't the clever apps that would be impossible to write without javascript. Go ahead and write those. I'm happy for you, really. The problem is pages that require javascript to display static content. There are very few good reasons for an article, or an image gallery, or a homepage that could have been displayed just fine a decade ago to now need javasc…

What, exactly, is the issue with writing a simple content site that requires JS? If you aren't pulling in half a MB of JS, but it does require scripting to function, I don't see the problem. Just because I could spend the effort to be progressive doesn't constrain me to have to do it. It doesn't make me a lazy programmer either: just pragmatic.

99.99% of the people visiting my site have JS enabled and I'm happy to support them just fine without worrying about the really long tail.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#14

Post by mynameisme » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 7:33 PM UTC

leokun wrote: post #8

Pinckney wrote: post #3

I think the point that's overlooked here is that the offenders aren't the clever apps that would be impossible to write without javascript. Go ahead and write those. I'm happy for you, really. The problem is pages that require javascript to display static content. There are very few good reasons for an article, or an image gallery, or a homepage that could have been displayed just fine a decade ago to now need javasc…

Check out meteor.js for why JavaScript would be needed for "static only content". Real time updates. That's why. Everything is an app.

Is this something people even want in content driven sites though? Imagine reddit in real time, it would be a mess and impossible to keep track of what you last read.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#15

Post by andrenotgiant » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 7:34 PM UTC

Progressive Enhancement is still important for CONTENT SITES

Why? Search Engine accessibility.

It used to be that Googlebot wouldn't find content loaded asynchronously, or links that rely on Javascript. Now it's different - You can confirm that Googlebot discovers a lot of Javascript links using Webmaster Tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en

BUT - There's still no way to break from the "Page Paradigm" - Google needs URLs to send searchers to. They don't yet send people to specific states of a page. That's why I still use Progressive Enhancement, it forces me to ensure each piece of content has a URL that points to it.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#16

Post by Xcelerate » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 7:34 PM UTC

I agree with all of his points. I think a lot of the counter-arguments are centered around "Yeah, but I see websites that unnecessarily use Javascript when a simple text-based solution will work". That's not a Javascript problem; that's a site-design problem.

I'm sure you could make a dynamic page that has a negligibly different loading time compared to a static page that both display similar (static) content, but it's the way that you do it that matters. Loading a page, that loads a library, that pulls in another library once the page is loaded, that then displays spinning gears while pulling in a bunch of static content is of course the wrong way to do it for a lot of things. But that's a design problem.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#17

Post by andrenotgiant » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 7:35 PM UTC

mmastrac wrote: post #13

Pinckney wrote: post #3

I think the point that's overlooked here is that the offenders aren't the clever apps that would be impossible to write without javascript. Go ahead and write those. I'm happy for you, really. The problem is pages that require javascript to display static content. There are very few good reasons for an article, or an image gallery, or a homepage that could have been displayed just fine a decade ago to now need javasc…

What, exactly, is the issue with writing a simple content site that requires JS? If you aren't pulling in half a MB of JS, but it does require scripting to function, I don't see the problem. Just because I could spend the effort to be progressive doesn't constrain me to have to do it. It doesn't make me a lazy programmer either: just pragmatic. 99.99% of the people visiting my site have JS enabled and I'm happy to su…

Javascript-dependent content _can_ present problems for search engine accessibility

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#18

Post by thecoffman » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 7:36 PM UTC

This post does nothing to address the biggest reason people might have Javascript disabled: security. If I'm browsing through Tor (or whatever), I'm not going to turn on Javascript to use your site. If your site doesn't work without it, you've lost a customer.

Granted, people who disable javascript are obviously vastly outnumbered, but just saying "fuck you" to security conscious (and most likely tech-savvy) users seems like a mistake.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#19

Post by anonymousab » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 7:36 PM UTC

leokun wrote: post #8

Pinckney wrote: post #3

I think the point that's overlooked here is that the offenders aren't the clever apps that would be impossible to write without javascript. Go ahead and write those. I'm happy for you, really. The problem is pages that require javascript to display static content. There are very few good reasons for an article, or an image gallery, or a homepage that could have been displayed just fine a decade ago to now need javasc…

Check out meteor.js for why JavaScript would be needed for "static only content". Real time updates. That's why. Everything is an app.

Which is silly. If I'm just trying to view a news article from yesterday or a year ago, I shouldn't have to worry about what some silly script is trying to do.

If the core of the content is or should be text, then there's no need for countless silly layers around it.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#20

Post by shawnz » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 7:36 PM UTC

This author is making an assumption that progressive enhancement exists only so that people who are browsing without Javascript can have a better experience. Of course, this isn't true. Progressive enhancement is a good thing because it encourages you to be as descriptive as possible at every layer of your technology stack.

Why does it matter in practice? Well, there's more than one reason, but consider that not every user agent is a browser with a person sitting in front of it. Your website also should be interpretable by content indexers like search engines, accessibility devices like screen readers, and so on.

Some services don't fit this model and really are better off being designed like desktop applications written in HTML and JS. But in my experience, most services can be modelled more like websites without making the design any more difficult to reason about, and almost all users' experiences are bettered by it.