[giancarlostoro]

Which also raises the question why do these websites not offer versions of their website that at least function enough without all the JS sugarcoating. I miss the early web with simpler designs.

Edit: Fixed poor wording.

[uptown]

Because designing, building, maintaining and supporting multiple versions of a site costs more. Imagine a tech support call when the first thing you need to determine is whether a user is using your full-featured site or your reduced-functionality site, and then explaining to the end user that they're on entirely the wrong site. Id guess that cost/benefit analysis just doesn't justify the effort in most cases.

[extrapickles]

The main issue is that people expect the modern web to behave more like an application, which generally requires client side code. JS is not the only thing to blame, as some CSS can cause the graphics card to switch from 2D to 3D, causing a vast increase in power consumption.

It would be much better of there was a good way to have the server issue partial updates of the DOM in response to user action without needing JS glue to make it happen.

Web developers can do this now if they don't need to easily react to user input. They can use HTTP multipart messages and slowly stream in HTML as needed. This is also fairly buggy in current browsers as websites stopped using it ever since XMLHttpRequest came out.

[cdelsolar]

raises the question