[RobertKerans]

"has become"? So will you be using Backbone + Marionette, or one of the other MVC frameworks? Which jQuery plugins will you be needing? Will you be using Require.js, or are you just going to have a big list of script tags? What about Bower? What about backwards compatibility and dependency management and other really boring things? If you have a very simple client that "just" uses the DOM APIs or an abstraction over a subset of those (ie jQuery), where have you shifted the complexity to?

Sorry to pick on your post over the million and one other ones that pop every time jQuery gets mentioned in HN (same for the "look at my my blog website that just uses HTML/CSS" posts), but why is it silly? There's no halcyon period where it was simpler and easier, and the tools are in general much better than they were.

[zamadatix]

As for "has become" there was a time when it was accepted there were things you didn't do in a browser and it was generally whatever the browser didn't support. If you wanted to do something real wild you'd use some app delivery plugin (java/flash/etc) which just happened to display in the page but that was the extent of involving the browser. Then browsers started supporting some of these abilities natively in response and complexity exploded to try to patch what the browsers shipped with at the time vs what people wanted in total resulting in many tools/libraries/frameworks to deal with the gap. Now the out of the box environment isn't very limited or fractured for the majority of use cases and so we have the option to go back to the simple era where "I can just use what's in the browser" again for most things, except now that generally covers whatever we want to make not "what a webpage should be" like it used to.