[noneckbeard]

This seems demonstrably untrue. Basic html development is vastly cheaper than “modern JavaScript” which would give any company w an HTML-only strategy a huge advantage. Why aren’t HTML-only companies dominating in every market?

[buboard]

You mean like amazon or ebay or paypal or yahoo? Or like how facebook was so html that they wrote their own php interpreter?

[mmczaplinski]

you mean the same facebook which created react.js? If you think any of those companies is not betting heavily on JS, you're out of touch :)

[buboard]

maybe, but i dont think they grew because of JS. they grew despite it maybe ;)

[reroute1]

maybe, but it's impossible without it

[UncleMeat]

None of those sites are static html. Not even close.

[buboard]

html != static

[azernik]

Static literally == not using JavaScript to manipulate the DOM. Once you're stuck using JS for core functionality, you really want a decent programming language.

I think people are complaining about two separate things - actually-static-ish websites like newspapers, shipping 10MB, and web apps like Facebook shipping 10MB. The latter is an unavoidable outcome of shipping Serious Software; the former is mostly driven by ad networks, not development ease.

[kuzimoto]

I think static could have multiple meaning, and the one the original comment meant is ambiguous. There are "static site generators" which technically generate static sites, but could still use JavaScript.

[buboard]

Yeah we re talking about html, not static. Plus, iirc, it is actually most SPAs that are ‘static’, i.e served as plain index.html containing all the Javascript.