Live data from Hacker News

Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

tomdale.net

81–90 of 263 posts

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#81
post #6

"And most importantly: Don’t be ashamed to build 100% JavaScript applications. You may get some incensed priests vituperating you in their blogs. But there will be an army of users (like me) who will fall in love with using your app." This statement needs a huge, HUGE caveat that you should only be building 100% JavaScript apps in situations where doing so makes sense . For example, I find the new Blogger "web app" i…

You know, check out bustle.com -- I used to agree with you, but that's really fast for both the first load and subsequent loads.

Idn, I'm not impressed with the initial load time. If that site was served as a static page that was recompiled when a new article was added, it would be significantly faster. But at the same time, subsequent loads would probably be a little slower. Which one is more worth it?

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#82
post #12

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 wi…

1/ Because you cant cache static resources on a CDN without javascript ? 2/ Because you cant load light html over the wire ?

3/ Because you cant cache html pages client side ?

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#83
post #25
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention stuff like accessibility that ends up being an afterthought for a lot of people.

Accessibility is a red herring. JavaScript apps work just fine with screen readers, especially if you support WAI-ARIA. http://words.steveklabnik.com/emberjs-and-accessibility

Absolutely, but the context "afterthought" narrows the situation to a very specific case, that in which you have given no consideration at all about accessibility.

My belief is that if you were able to produce good markup, it would have been accessible from the very beginning, because accessible markup tends to be well-formed and semantically correct.

This would probably rule knowledge of WAI-ARIA out from everyone who fit parent's case.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#84

Only if you never need any referrals from search engines. I know a site that has this awesome locally sourced food delivery/pickup system. Connecting consumers directly with the growers. Their site is 100% in JS. And if you google for anything even remotely close to what this site sells you simply cannot find them. Unless you are a members only app site would I say progressive enhancement is dead. Well that is unless…

That's a developer problem, not a Javascript problem.

No that's a javascript problem which makes things more complicated for little gain. With progressive enhancement you dont need all these phantomjs stupid tricks.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Javascript-dependent content _can_ present problems for search engine accessibility

I have to assume, in Google’s case anyway, that they are indexing according to ‘what the user sees’. Not to do so would means lower-quality search results. Users don’t care how the page ‘happens’. I make this assumption because most of us don’t actually know how Google works, acting as a user’s proxy is in Google’s interest, and it is certainly within their technological capability. (Let me emphasize assume , again.)…

From Google's technical guidlines:

"Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site."

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#86
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why should users have to click refresh for pages to load more comments or to see when someone replies to you? The fact that reddit does not do this is not evidence that it would be confusing.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#87

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 se…

I think the real question is which group is larger: the customers I'll gain by enabling a feature that requires JavaScript or the customers I'll lose because they're unable to view a feature that requires JavaScript. According to developer.yahoo.com[1], > After crunching the numbers, we found a consistent rate of JavaScript-disabled requests hovering around 1% of the actual visitor traffic[...]. I work for a medium s…

1% is a small percentage but can make up quite a large number of people.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#88

> Worrying about browsers without JavaScript is like worrying about whether you’re backwards compatible with HTML 3.2 or CSS2. At some point, you have to accept that some things are just part of the platform. This is the key bit. It's a pretty popular attitude on HN to dismiss supporting IE, or IE7, or even IE8 or IE9 -- despite having significant user bases. But there's still a strong vocal contingent which argues f…

It's not just the people with JavaScript turned off: it's people who, for example, rely on the Readability or Readable bookmarklets or Safari's Reader functionality.

In general turning documents into programs deprives users of those documents of a kind flexibility that they enjoyed when documents were just data.

And does it not bother you that web-browser development has gotten so complicated and labor-intensive that there are exactly five organizations with the resources to maintain a web browser?

What hope do operating systems with very small userbases like Plan 9 have of ever running a web browser capable of displaying correctly the majority of web site?

Browser complexity closes off certain opportunities: e.g., about 15 years ago, a blind programmer named Karl Dahlke wrote a "command-line web browser" called "edbrowse" that has a command language similar to the line editor ed. Is it OK with you that the fraction of web pages browsable with edbrowse keeps going down?

Another way that making the web a richer application-delivery platform reduces the options available to users: approximately nobody bothers to maintain a local copy of the web pages they have browsed (which would be among other things a useful insurance against web pages disappearing from the web) because it is so complicated to do.

And then there is the loss of consistency useful to readers. For example, when you click on a link, then hit the Back button, the browser used to always put you back at the same place in the web page that you were when you clicked the link. Not anymore: for example, if you click a search result on hnsearch.com, then hit Back, you are taken to the start of the web page containing the search results with the result that you have to scroll through results you've already sifted through just to get back to the state of progress you were in when you clicked the link.

A possible reply to that is that the maintainer of hnsearch.com should fix his web site. But the number and variety of "losses" or "regressions" like that one is so large -- and increasing so fast -- as to make me doubt that webmasters will ever get around to fixing most of them, particularly since webmasters on average are less technically knowledgeable than, e.g., programmers are.

Selecting an extent of text in preparation for copying it is another thing that has become less consistent and controllable over time: sometimes when I just want to select a few words, slight movement of the cursor while dragging will cause an entire adjacent column of text to be selected or de-selected according to rules that are essentially unknowable to the reader.

In the past, for about 15 years, the space key consistently meant "scroll down a screenful" (provided the page as a whole has the focus -- as opposed to, e.g., a TEXTAREA in the page). The desire to turn the web into an applications-delivery platform caused the web site to gain the discretion to map the space key to something else, which is a gain for authors of web apps, but a loss for readers who used to be able to depend on consistent behavior from the space key.

In summary, although I am happy that many thousands of applications developers are now able to make good livings without becoming a "tenant" or a "captive" of a platform owned by a single corporation, I am sad about how complicated, tedious and mystifying it has become to use the web to consume static content -- and how expensive (in programmer time and effort) it has become to put static web content to uses not foreseen and provided for by the author of the content.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#89
Stating that one approach or the other is always the right way is the problem. Figure out which one works best for the type of site you are working on.

How your site will be used is often a high level indicator of which approach will provide a better experience for your users. Gmail for example, no public part of the site, not uncommon for users to leave it open in a tab all day. Often great for all Javascript approach.

Twitter on the opposite end. Lots of public facing pages, performance was worse when they required Javascript just to render 140 characters on the screen. This style of site is generally better off with a progressive enhancement approach.

Post reply on HN