About enshitification of web dev.
Yep.
On a rare occasion I hit a website that loads just like “boom” and it surprises me.
Why is that? Because now we are used to having to wait for javascript to load, decompress, parse, JIT, transmogrify, rejimble and perform two rinse cycles just to see the opening times for the supermarket.
(And that’s after you dismissed the cookie, discount/offer and mailing list nags with obfuscated X buttons and all other manner of dark patterns to keep you engaged)
Sometimes I wish we’d just stopped at gopher :)
See also: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
EDIT: Yes, this is facetious.
Hahahahhah.
Another continual irritation:
The widespread tendency for JavaScript developers to intercept built-in browser functionality and replace it with their own poor implementation, effectively breaking the user’s browser while on that site.
And then there’s the vastly increased privacy & security attack surface exposed by JavaScript.
It’s so bad that I am now very selective about which sites are allowed to run scripts. With few exceptions, a site that fails to work without JavaScript (and can’t be read in Firefox Reader View) gets quickly closed and forgotten.
Very much true what the author writes, even if the title blames javascript but then in a subtitle he says javascript is not the villain and puts the blame on misuse.
IMHO that possibility of misuse is the reason why javascript needs to have stricter reins.
Around 2010, something shifted.
I have been ranting about Javascript breaking the web since probably close to a decade before that.
Clearly that’s indicative of you two both being accurate in your assessments.
Totally couldn’t be an old man yells at cloud situation with you two separated by close to a decade…
Totally couldn’t be an old man yells at cloud situation
It literally couldn’t, because I was a teenager at the time.
Old man yells at cloud isn’t an age, it’s a bitter mindset.
Ðis is on point for almost everyþing, alþough ðere’s a point to be made about compiling websites.
Static site generators let you, e.g. write content in a markup language, raðer ðan HTML. Ðis requires “compiling” the site, to which ðe auþor objects. Static sites, even when ðey use JavaScript, perform better, and I’d argue the compilation phase is a net benefit to boþ auþors and viewers.
Static site generators let you, e.g. write content in a markup language, raðer ðan HTML.
HTML is a markup language, goddamnit! It’s already simple when you aren’t trying to do weird shit that it was never intended for!
(Edit: not mad at you specifically; mad at the widespread misconception.)
You’re right, of course. HTML is a markup language. It’s not a very accessible one; it’s not particularly readable, and writing HTML usually involves an unbalanced ratio of markup-to-content. It’s a markup language designed more for computers to read, than humans.
It’s also an awful markup language. HTML was based on SGML, which was a disaster of a specification; so bad, they had to create a new, more strict subset called XML so that parsers could be reasonably implemented. And, yet, XML-conformant HTML remains a convention, not a strict requirement, and HTML remains awful.
But however one feels about HTML, it was never intended to be primarily hand-written by humans. Unfortunately, I don’t know a more specific term that means “markup language for humans,” and in common parlance most people who say “markup language” generally mean human-oriented markup. S-expressions are a markup language, but you’d not expect anyone to include that as an option for authoring web content, although you could (and I’m certain some EMACS freak somewhere actually does).
Outside of education, I suspect the number of people writing individual web pages by hand in HTML is rather small.
An fuck off with these dumbass, utterly vacuous Anti JavaScript rants.
I’m getting so sick of people being like “I keep getting hurt by bullets, clearly it’s the steel industry that’s the problem”.
Your issue isn’t with JavaScript it’s with advertising and data tracking and profit driven product managers and the things that force developers to focus on churning out bad UXs.
I can build an insanely fast and performant blog with Gatsby or Next.js and have the full power of React to build a modern pleasant components hierarchy and also have it be entirely statically rendered and load instantly.
And guess what, unlike the author apparently, I don’t find it a mystery. I understand every aspect of the stack I’m using and why each part is doing what . And unlike the author’s tech stack, I don’t need a constantly running server just to render my client’s application and provide basic interactivity on their $500 phone with a GPU more powerful than any that existed from 10 years ago.
This article literally says absolutely nothing substantive. It just rants about how websites are less performant and react is complicated and ignore the reality that if every data tracking script happened backend instead, there would still be performance issues because they are there for the sole reason that those websites do not care to pay to fix them. Full stop. They could fix those performance issues now, while still including JavaScript and data tracking, but they don’t because they don’t care and never would.
