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Discussion on: The Web I Want

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rhymes profile image
rhymes • Edited

I agree with the sentiment: we can and we need to do better.

I do remember the days of A list apart, CSS Zen Garden and Eric Meyer's website :D

I'm not tranchant on JS, I don't think the solution is to not use it, we're definitely past that. The solution is to stop and think about what we're doing :-) I wrote only one SPA and it's an "internal" application for a client which is never going to be Internet facing or public but I did notice how low the score with Lighthouse is :-)

Many CMS are also full of JS and a lot of websites are generated by CMS. Fortunately (also thanks to this influx of JavaScript) I see a growing interest in static websites generated by headless CMS.

You're going to love this: The Cost Of JavaScript In 2018 by Addy Osmani - the beauty of this article is how thorough and deep it is and how he considers the average phone as a benchmark reference.

I still don't know enough to have an definitive opinion on this topic but we can all agree that sending 2mb of JS to a person on 2G or 3G is unwise.

ps. dev.to is a SPA but I tried to write and post this comment after disabling JavaScript on Firefox (whose setting is buried in about:config :D) and I got an error, which is fine, SPAs are not supposed to work without JS...

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quii profile image
Chris James

I do remember the days of A list apart, CSS Zen Garden and Eric Meyer's website :D

It was so good, it felt like a real positive movement for the web

ps. dev.to is a SPA but I tried to write and post this comment after disabling JavaScript on Firefox (whose setting is buried in about:config :D) and I got an error, which is fine, SPAs are not supposed to work without JS...

I do mean to host this post on my own blog when I get home!

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I basically agree with all of what you said. We made some pragmatic choices along the way to serve an experience which mostly works and serves an efficient experience for 95% of requests.

Not to defend the bad, but things are overall pretty okay. Specifically, the chat feature and other generally "live" features are pretty much entirely responsible for some of this JS dependence.

Anyway, you'd be happy to hear that now that we're open source, we're pruning some of the bloat that kind of just made its way in when we were pushing a bit too hard to cram in the features folks were demanding. Our approach has returned to a much more principled one.

Anyway, just wanted to address this from my perspective. I'm spiritually aligned, but we've got some work to do. Eventually I'd like to offer various configurations that would allow folks to turn off certain features in order to run differently in different scenarios.

:)