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Discussion on: Is 0kb of JavaScript in your Future?

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

the ability to server render a page and then have forms function perfectly fine without loading the JavaScript bundles

Isn't that out-the-box functionality with a web browser? I think I'm missing a step, because (without watching a long video) this seems to be talking about websites that work without javascript - which is all websites by default. If you use Javascript and break default functionality in the process, you're taking a step backwards and uninventing the wheel!

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Ryan Carniato

It might be funny that I'm coming at this sort of backwards. The reality is that app development has gotten to a point where there is no expectation for it to work without JavaScript turned on. It might we working backwards, but it is completely where it is at. The old 2 steps forward 1 step back sort of thing.

A thing like a form has always been here to solve the problem, but if you look at highly interactive apps they moved way beyond these simple interactions and at some point stopped even trying to preserve this as they passed over a threshold where without JavaScript the experience would be so poor anyway.

Something like these simple demo really makes it obvious, and I think the Remix guys needed to make an example like this to really hit it home that audience. But even speaking for myself I haven't been making apps that looked like that for almost a decade. To be fair for the developer it was always a choice to support it, but was it worth the effort without the tooling to support you doing so? Probably not for a lot of things.

I'm happy to see that this is entering perspective again in terms of being able to have both. But it wasn't a priority of JavaScript frameworks for a long time.

To state it another way. If your goal is to maximize on the experience you can deliver with all tools available you aren't going to focus on arbitrary limitations initially. These could be important limitations but if they are outside of your target, how much time are you going to spend? I think that we are seeing a shift (maturing) of these technologies due to their own growth, and to a growing expectation from them that goes beyond what their original goals were.