People in this thread who aren’t web devs: “web devs are just lazy”
Web devs: Alright buddy boy, you try making a web site these days with the required complexity with only HTML and CSS. 😆 All you’d get is static content and maybe some forms. Any kind of interactivity goes out the door.
Non web devs: “nah bruh this site is considered broken for the mere fact that it uses JavaScript at all”
Not sure that was the issue. I mean more that if you use only HTML and CSS all you’ll be able to create would be static sites that only change the contents of the page by full reloads. 🙂
A lot of this interactivity is complete bullshit, especially on sites that are mostly just for static data like news articles, the JS is there for advertisement and analytics and social media and other bullshit
News site dev here. I’ll never build a site for this company that relies on js for anything other than video playback (yay hls patents, and they won’t let me offer mp4 as an alternative because preroll pays our bills, despite everyone feeling entitled to free news with no ads)
it sounds like you’re saying there’s an easy solution to get websites that don’t have shit moving on you nonstop with graphics and non-content frames taking up 60% of the available screen
it’s crazy that on a 1440p monitor, I still can’t just see all the content I want on one screen. nope, gotta show like 20% of it and scroll for the rest. and even if you zoom out, it will automatically resize to keep proportion, it won’t show any of the other 80%
I’m not a web dev. but I am a user, and I know the experience sucks.
if I’m looking at the results of a product search and I see five results at a time because of shitty layout, I just don’t buy from that company
I unironically use Lynx from my home lab s when I’m ssh’d in snce it’s headless. Sometimes at work I miss the simplicity. I used to use Pine for Gmail as well. 😁
If you have static content, then sure, serve up some SSR HTML. But pages with even static content usually have some form of interactivity, like searching (suggestions/auto-complete), etc. 🤷♂️
Back in my day, we’d take that fully-functional form and do progressive enhancement to add that functionality on top with js. You know, back when we (or the people paying us) gave a fuck.
I can do it but it’s hard convincing clients to double their budget for customers with accessible needs they’re not equipped to support in other channels.
That being said, my personal sites and projects all do it. And I’m thankful for accessible website laws where I’m from that make it mandatory for companies over a certain size to include accessible supports that need to work when JS is disabled.
Some provinces in Canada have rules that businesses’ websites must meet or exceed the WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines when they exceed a certain employee headcount, which includes screen reader support that ensures all content must be available to a browser that doesn’t have JavaScript enabled.
Also the EU and technically a lot of US sites that provide services to or for the government have similar requirements. The latter is largely unenforced though unless you’re interacting with states that also have accessibility laws.
And honestly a ton of sites that should be covered by these requirements just don’t care or get rubber stamped as compliant. Because unless someone actually complains they don’t have a reason to care.
I kind of thought the EU requirements that have some actual penalties would change this indifference but other than some busy accessibility groups helping people that already care, I haven’t heard a lot about enforcement that would suggest it’s actually changed.
Mostly marketing and informational websites for the public. Businesses, tourism spots, local charities and nonprofits, etc. Nothing that’s going to change the world but hopefully makes somebody’s day a little easier when they need to look something up.
It doesn’t have to not include JavaScript, that would be quite difficult and unreasonable. Accessible sites are not about limiting functionality but providing the same functionality.
I haven’t gone fully down the rabbit hole on this but my understanding is even something like Nuxt if you follow best practices will deliver HTML that can be interacted with and serve individual pages.
That said, screen readers and other support shouldn’t require running without any JavaScript. Having used them to test sites that might be the smart approach but they actually have a lot of tools for announcing dynamic website changes that are built into ARIA properties at the HTML level so very flexible. There are of course also JavaScript APIs for announcing changes.
They just require additional effort and forethought to implement and can be buggy if you do really weird things.
Ehhhhh it kinda’ depends. Most things that are merely changing how something already present on the page is displayed? Probably don’t need JS. Doing something cool based on the submit or response of a form? Probably don’t need JS. Changing something dynamically based off of what the user is doing? Might not need JS!
Need to do some computation off of the response of said form and change a bunch of the page? You probably need JS. Need to support older browsers simply doing all of the previously described things? Probably need JS.
It really, really depends on what needs to happen and why. Most websites are still in the legacy support realm, at least conceptually, so JS sadly is required for many, many websites. Not that they use it in the most ideal way, but few situations are ideal in the first place.
A lot of this is just non-tech savvy people failing to understand the limitations and history of the internet.
(this isn’t to defend the BS modern corporations pull, but just to explain the “how” of the often times shitty requirements the web devs are dealing with)
Virtually any form validation besides the basics HTML provides is enough to require JS, and input validation (paired with server-side validation ofc) saves both user frustration and bandwidth
Of course it depends, like all things. But in my mind, there’s a few select, very specific types of pages that wouldn’t require at least a bit of JavaScript these days. Very static, non-changing, non-interactive. Even email could work/has worked with HTML only. But the experience is severely limited and reduced, of course.
Stop, can only get so erect. Give me that please than the bullshit I have to wade trough today to find information. When is the store open. E-mailadress/phone. Like fuck if I want to engage
😆 F—ck, I hear you loud and clear on that one. But that’s a different problem altogether, organizing information.
People suck at that. I don’t think they ever even use their own site or have it tested on anyone before shipping. Sometimes it’s absolutely impossible to find information about something, like even what a product even is or does. So stupid.
That would make the website feel ultra slow since a full page load would be needed every time. Something as simple as a slide out menu needs JavaScript and couldn’t really be done server side.
When if you said just send the parts of the page that changed, that dynamic content loading would still be JavaScript. Maybe an iframe could get you somewhere but that’s a hacky work around and you couldn’t interact between different frames
A slide out menu can be done in pure CSS and HTML. Imho, it would look bad regardless.
When if you said just send the parts of the page that changed, that dynamic content loading would still be JavaScript
OP is trying to access a restaurant website that has no interactivity. It has a bunch of static information, a few download links for menu PDFs, a link to a different domain to place an order online, and an iframe (to a different domain) for making a table reservation.
The web dev using javascript on that page is lazy, yet also creating way more work for themself.
https://htmx.org/ solves the problem of full page loads. Yes, it’s a JavaScript library, but it’s a tiny JS library (14k over the wire) that is easily cached. And in most cases, it’s the only JavaScript you need. The vast majority of content can be rendered server side.
While fair, now you have to have JavaScript enabled in the page which I think was the point. It was never able having only a little bit. It was that you had to have it enabled
Yes, it is unfortunate that this functionality is not built-in to HTML/browsers to begin with. The library is effectively a patch for the deficiencies of the original spec. Hopefully it can one day be integrated into HTML proper.
Until then, HTMX can still be used by browsers that block third party scripts, which is where a lot of the nasty stuff comes from anyway. And JS can be whitelisted on certain sites that are known to use it responsibly.
So, your site still doesn’t work without JS but you get to not use all the convenience React brings to the table? Boy, what a deal! Maybe you should go talk to Trump about those tariffs. You seem to be at least as capable as Flintenuschi!
As it was, HTML was all sites had. When these were called “ugly”, CSS was invented for style and presentation stuff. When the need for advanced interactivity (not doable on Internet speeds of 20-30 years ago), someone just said “fuck it, do whatever you want” and added scripting to browsers.
The real solution came in the form of HTML5. You no longer needed, and I can’t stress this enough, Flash to play a video in-browser. For other things as well.
Well, HTML5 is over 15 years old by now. And maybe the time has come to bring in new functionality into either HTML, CSS or a new, third component of web sites (maybe even JS itself?)
Stuff like menus. There’s no need for then to be limited by the half-assed workaround known as CSS pseudoclasses or for every website to have its own JS implementation.
Stuff like basic math stuff. HTML has had forms since forever. Letting it do some more, like counting down, accessing its equivalent of the Date and Math classes, and tallying up a shopping cart on a webshop seems like a better fix than a bunch of frameworks.
Just make a standardized “framework” built directly into the browser - it’d speed up development, lower complexity, reduce bloat and increase performance. And that’s just the stuff off the top of my head.
Something as simple as a slide out menu needs JavaScript and couldn’t really be done server side.
I’m not trying to tell anyone how to design their webpages. I’m also a bit old fashioned. But I stopped making animated gimmicks many years ago. When someone is viewing such things on a small screen, in landscape mode, it’s going to be a shit user experience at best. That’s just my 2 cents from personal experience.
I’m sure there are examples of where js is necessary. It certainly has it’s place. I just feel like it’s over used. Now if you’re at the mercy of someone else that demands x y and z, then I guess you gotta do what you gotta do.
“nah bruh this site is considered broken for the mere fact that it uses JavaScript at all”
A little paraphrased, but that’s the gist.
Isn’t there an article just today that talks about CSS doing most of the heavy-lifting java is usually crutched to do?
I did webdev before the framework blight. It was manual php, it was ASP, it was soul-crushing. That’s the basis for my claim that javascript lamers are just lazy, and supply-chain splots waiting to manifest.
CSS doing most of the heavy-lifting java is usually crutched to do
JavaScript you mean? Some small subset of things that JavaScript was forced to handle before can be done in CSS, yes, but that only goes for styling and layout, not interactivity, obviously.
I did webdev before the framework blight.
That’s the basis for my claim that javascript lamers are just lazy
There is some extremely heavy prejudice and unnecessary hate going on here, which is woefully misdirected. Well get to that. But the amount of time that has passed since you did web dev might put you at a disadvantage to make claims about web development these days. 👍
Anyway. Us JavaScript/TypeScript “lamers” are doing the best with what we’ve got. The web platform is very broken and fragmented because of its history. It’s not something regular web devs can do much about. We use the framework or library that suits us best for the task at hand and the resources we are given (time, basically). It’s not like any project will be your dream unicorn project where you get to decide the infrastructure from the start or get to invent a new library or a new browser to target that does things differently and doesn’t have to be backwards compatible with the web at large. Things don’t work this way.
Don’t you think we sigh all day because we have to monkey patch the web to make our sites behave in the way the acceptance criteria demand? You call that lazy, but we are working our knuckles to the bone to make things work reasonably well for as many people as we can, including accessibility for those with reduced function. It’s not an easy task.
… “Lazy.” I scoffed in offense, to be honest with you.
It’s like telling someone who made bread from scratch they’re lazy for not growing their own wheat, ffs.
People in this thread who aren’t web devs: “web devs are just lazy”
Web devs: Alright buddy boy, you try making a web site these days with the required complexity with only HTML and CSS. 😆 All you’d get is static content and maybe some forms. Any kind of interactivity goes out the door.
Non web devs: “nah bruh this site is considered broken for the mere fact that it uses JavaScript at all”
Making a static site is a piece of piss. There are even generators on npm.
Not sure that was the issue. I mean more that if you use only HTML and CSS all you’ll be able to create would be static sites that only change the contents of the page by full reloads. 🙂
A lot of this interactivity is complete bullshit, especially on sites that are mostly just for static data like news articles, the JS is there for advertisement and analytics and social media and other bullshit
News site dev here. I’ll never build a site for this company that relies on js for anything other than video playback (yay hls patents, and they won’t let me offer mp4 as an alternative because preroll pays our bills, despite everyone feeling entitled to free news with no ads)
it sounds like you’re saying there’s an easy solution to get websites that don’t have shit moving on you nonstop with graphics and non-content frames taking up 60% of the available screen
it’s crazy that on a 1440p monitor, I still can’t just see all the content I want on one screen. nope, gotta show like 20% of it and scroll for the rest. and even if you zoom out, it will automatically resize to keep proportion, it won’t show any of the other 80%
I’m not a web dev. but I am a user, and I know the experience sucks.
if I’m looking at the results of a product search and I see five results at a time because of shitty layout, I just don’t buy from that company
I had a bit of trouble following that first paragraph. I don’t understand what it is that you say it sounds like I’m saying.
Either way, none of what you wrote I disagree with. I feel the same. Bad design does not elicit trust.
I’m saying your point about static content being all we would get sounds great
lol, no argument here, to be fair 😄
I’ll take an API and a curl call over JavaScript any day of the week.
If I didn’t input it myself with a punch card I refuse to run it.
I unironically use Lynx from my home lab s when I’m ssh’d in snce it’s headless. Sometimes at work I miss the simplicity. I used to use Pine for Gmail as well. 😁
😆 that do be what they sound like
That site is literally just static content. Yes JS is needed for interactivity, but there’s none here
If you have static content, then sure, serve up some SSR HTML. But pages with even static content usually have some form of interactivity, like searching (suggestions/auto-complete), etc. 🤷♂️
Search is easier to implement without Javascript than with.
<form method="GET" action="/search"> <input name="q"> <input type=submit> </form>Does that little snippet include suggestions, like I mentioned? Of course it’s easier with less functionality.
Back in my day, we’d take that fully-functional form and do progressive enhancement to add that functionality on top with js. You know, back when we (or the people paying us) gave a fuck.
It’s not about using js or not, it’s about failing gracefully. An empty page instead of a simple written article is not acceptable.
An empty page isn’t great, I would indeed agree with that.
I can do it but it’s hard convincing clients to double their budget for customers with accessible needs they’re not equipped to support in other channels.
That being said, my personal sites and projects all do it. And I’m thankful for accessible website laws where I’m from that make it mandatory for companies over a certain size to include accessible supports that need to work when JS is disabled.
What country or area would that be?
And what do you mean by “do it”? What is it exactly that you do or make without JavaScript?
Some provinces in Canada have rules that businesses’ websites must meet or exceed the WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines when they exceed a certain employee headcount, which includes screen reader support that ensures all content must be available to a browser that doesn’t have JavaScript enabled.
Also the EU and technically a lot of US sites that provide services to or for the government have similar requirements. The latter is largely unenforced though unless you’re interacting with states that also have accessibility laws.
And honestly a ton of sites that should be covered by these requirements just don’t care or get rubber stamped as compliant. Because unless someone actually complains they don’t have a reason to care.
I kind of thought the EU requirements that have some actual penalties would change this indifference but other than some busy accessibility groups helping people that already care, I haven’t heard a lot about enforcement that would suggest it’s actually changed.
That’s excellent.
And what do you make that doesn’t include JavaScript? Like what kind of software/website/content? If you don’t mind sharing, of course.
Mostly marketing and informational websites for the public. Businesses, tourism spots, local charities and nonprofits, etc. Nothing that’s going to change the world but hopefully makes somebody’s day a little easier when they need to look something up.
Good stuff!
It doesn’t have to not include JavaScript, that would be quite difficult and unreasonable. Accessible sites are not about limiting functionality but providing the same functionality.
I haven’t gone fully down the rabbit hole on this but my understanding is even something like Nuxt if you follow best practices will deliver HTML that can be interacted with and serve individual pages.
That said, screen readers and other support shouldn’t require running without any JavaScript. Having used them to test sites that might be the smart approach but they actually have a lot of tools for announcing dynamic website changes that are built into ARIA properties at the HTML level so very flexible. There are of course also JavaScript APIs for announcing changes.
They just require additional effort and forethought to implement and can be buggy if you do really weird things.
Ehhhhh it kinda’ depends. Most things that are merely changing how something already present on the page is displayed? Probably don’t need JS. Doing something cool based on the submit or response of a form? Probably don’t need JS. Changing something dynamically based off of what the user is doing? Might not need JS!
Need to do some computation off of the response of said form and change a bunch of the page? You probably need JS. Need to support older browsers simply doing all of the previously described things? Probably need JS.
It really, really depends on what needs to happen and why. Most websites are still in the legacy support realm, at least conceptually, so JS sadly is required for many, many websites. Not that they use it in the most ideal way, but few situations are ideal in the first place.
A lot of this is just non-tech savvy people failing to understand the limitations and history of the internet.
(this isn’t to defend the BS modern corporations pull, but just to explain the “how” of the often times shitty requirements the web devs are dealing with)
Virtually any form validation besides the basics HTML provides is enough to require JS, and input validation (paired with server-side validation ofc) saves both user frustration and bandwidth
Of course it depends, like all things. But in my mind, there’s a few select, very specific types of pages that wouldn’t require at least a bit of JavaScript these days. Very static, non-changing, non-interactive. Even email could work/has worked with HTML only. But the experience is severely limited and reduced, of course.
Stop, can only get so erect. Give me that please than the bullshit I have to wade trough today to find information. When is the store open. E-mailadress/phone. Like fuck if I want to engage
😆 F—ck, I hear you loud and clear on that one. But that’s a different problem altogether, organizing information.
People suck at that. I don’t think they ever even use their own site or have it tested on anyone before shipping. Sometimes it’s absolutely impossible to find information about something, like even what a product even is or does. So stupid.
You can say fuck on the internet
I also have the right to self-censor myself for effect. 👍👍
I would argue that a lot it scripting can and should be done server side.
That would make the website feel ultra slow since a full page load would be needed every time. Something as simple as a slide out menu needs JavaScript and couldn’t really be done server side.
When if you said just send the parts of the page that changed, that dynamic content loading would still be JavaScript. Maybe an iframe could get you somewhere but that’s a hacky work around and you couldn’t interact between different frames
A slide out menu can be done in pure CSS and HTML. Imho, it would look bad regardless.
OP is trying to access a restaurant website that has no interactivity. It has a bunch of static information, a few download links for menu PDFs, a link to a different domain to place an order online, and an iframe (to a different domain) for making a table reservation.
The web dev using javascript on that page is lazy, yet also creating way more work for themself.
https://htmx.org/ solves the problem of full page loads. Yes, it’s a JavaScript library, but it’s a tiny JS library (14k over the wire) that is easily cached. And in most cases, it’s the only JavaScript you need. The vast majority of content can be rendered server side.
While fair, now you have to have JavaScript enabled in the page which I think was the point. It was never able having only a little bit. It was that you had to have it enabled
Yes, it is unfortunate that this functionality is not built-in to HTML/browsers to begin with. The library is effectively a patch for the deficiencies of the original spec. Hopefully it can one day be integrated into HTML proper.
Until then, HTMX can still be used by browsers that block third party scripts, which is where a lot of the nasty stuff comes from anyway. And JS can be whitelisted on certain sites that are known to use it responsibly.
So, your site still doesn’t work without JS but you get to not use all the convenience React brings to the table? Boy, what a deal! Maybe you should go talk to Trump about those tariffs. You seem to be at least as capable as Flintenuschi!
JS is just a janky hotfix.
As it was, HTML was all sites had. When these were called “ugly”, CSS was invented for style and presentation stuff. When the need for advanced interactivity (not doable on Internet speeds of 20-30 years ago), someone just said “fuck it, do whatever you want” and added scripting to browsers.
The real solution came in the form of HTML5. You no longer needed, and I can’t stress this enough, Flash to play a video in-browser. For other things as well.
Well, HTML5 is over 15 years old by now. And maybe the time has come to bring in new functionality into either HTML, CSS or a new, third component of web sites (maybe even JS itself?)
Stuff like menus. There’s no need for then to be limited by the half-assed workaround known as CSS pseudoclasses or for every website to have its own JS implementation.
Stuff like basic math stuff. HTML has had forms since forever. Letting it do some more, like counting down, accessing its equivalent of the Date and Math classes, and tallying up a shopping cart on a webshop seems like a better fix than a bunch of frameworks.
Just make a standardized “framework” built directly into the browser - it’d speed up development, lower complexity, reduce bloat and increase performance. And that’s just the stuff off the top of my head.
I’m not trying to tell anyone how to design their webpages. I’m also a bit old fashioned. But I stopped making animated gimmicks many years ago. When someone is viewing such things on a small screen, in landscape mode, it’s going to be a shit user experience at best. That’s just my 2 cents from personal experience.
I’m sure there are examples of where js is necessary. It certainly has it’s place. I just feel like it’s over used. Now if you’re at the mercy of someone else that demands x y and z, then I guess you gotta do what you gotta do.
If you want to zoom into a graph plot, you want each wheel scroll tick to be sent to the server to generate a new image and a full page reload?
How would you even detect the mouse wheel scroll?
All interactivity goes out the door.
A little paraphrased, but that’s the gist.
Isn’t there an article just today that talks about CSS doing most of the heavy-lifting java is usually crutched to do?
I did webdev before the framework blight. It was manual php, it was ASP, it was soul-crushing. That’s the basis for my claim that javascript lamers are just lazy, and supply-chain splots waiting to manifest.
JavaScript you mean? Some small subset of things that JavaScript was forced to handle before can be done in CSS, yes, but that only goes for styling and layout, not interactivity, obviously.
There is some extremely heavy prejudice and unnecessary hate going on here, which is woefully misdirected. Well get to that. But the amount of time that has passed since you did web dev might put you at a disadvantage to make claims about web development these days. 👍
Anyway. Us JavaScript/TypeScript “lamers” are doing the best with what we’ve got. The web platform is very broken and fragmented because of its history. It’s not something regular web devs can do much about. We use the framework or library that suits us best for the task at hand and the resources we are given (time, basically). It’s not like any project will be your dream unicorn project where you get to decide the infrastructure from the start or get to invent a new library or a new browser to target that does things differently and doesn’t have to be backwards compatible with the web at large. Things don’t work this way.
Don’t you think we sigh all day because we have to monkey patch the web to make our sites behave in the way the acceptance criteria demand? You call that lazy, but we are working our knuckles to the bone to make things work reasonably well for as many people as we can, including accessibility for those with reduced function. It’s not an easy task.
… “Lazy.” I scoffed in offense, to be honest with you.
It’s like telling someone who made bread from scratch they’re lazy for not growing their own wheat, ffs.
Let’s see you do better. 👍👍👍👍👍👍