prawl's comments

prawl | 8 years ago | on: A day without JavaScript

If the main work your site is doing is showing pictures and text - and this is still and always will be a large part of the web - the browser has a number of features that work very smoothly and reliably out of the box: scrolling, page history, following a link when it is clicked, right-click save as, searchability, basic accessibility, etc. - and typically much quicker rendering than something which waits for a lot of extra HTTP requests and extra work being done in a VM somewhere.

Reimplementing these features in JS is often pretty feasible, and occasionally there are use cases for it, but it's a lot of additional overhead and it's not at all unusual to introduce bugs that really hurt the UX. (UX is not just adding as much branding as possible on top of vanilla browser behavior.)

The average newspaper website should not load 15 megs of junk from 20 different domains with a massive amount of Angular code just so I can read a single paragraph of plain text. This is an example of a document, it's what the web was made for and browsers already do it well without turning most documents into an SPA.

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