Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lol. For hiding a voting arrow after it's clicked. Yes, you're right. You don't need any of that stuff. But if you were to write an entire app in the style of those two functions, things would fall apart. That's not even a hypothetical, it's been proven over and over again that it doesn't work. How is everyone agreeing with you? Is there that much JS fatigue that we're looking at the equivalent of a horse-drawn carri…
I think the point is that there's actually little wrong with using standard HTML forms and hyperlinks most of the time. There is an increasing trend to move the whole website to the client side to be handled entirely by the JavaScript as a single actual page. Personally I find most websites work better with a simple round trip to the server to fetch more HTML. So actually building an entire system in this style isn't…
> you just only write JavaScript for the cases where there is a real legitimate benefit to doing so
The snippet above only works because HN is so simple, normally the rule of thumb is if you are going to use JS to change the DOM at all then you need to render it in the first place using JS or else you are double-implementing the render logic and you open yourself up to changing one implementation and not the other. For hiding arrows sure this works but 99.999% of the time it's a very bad idea to use JS to change the dom to a state that the server would otherwise render on a page reload. You may feel that a round trip works better but that's not what users expect or will tolerate most of the time. That kind of thinking feels very close to people who think CRUD is all you need to build an app. Sure you can build an app with just that but thinks break down very quickly.