[duxup]

I feel like I sympathize with a lot of the various JavaScript rants in a way … but I’m not convinced that many of the blogs about it (that now feel like years old spam) are actually practicing what they preach or have ever waved the magic wand they want to exist.

I’ve yet to see a real guide from someone building an even moderately complex site and moving away from these terrible frameworks and “unnecessary JS”.

In the end most of these boil down to “I wish other people would build their sites the way I want them to” without much consideration of how / why a site is the way it is in the first place.

[chubot]

Yeah I'd like to see that too. One site I think that does a fantastic job is sourcehut. It actually has a little bit of JS, e.g. for the builds page to stream results, but it's fast and light, and measured to be fast.

And it's a pretty big and functional site.

https://sourcehut.org/

https://forgeperf.org/

I've looked at the source code and it's very straightforward Flask apps and Jinja templates, and hand-written JavaScript.

https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sourcehut/sources

For people who don't remember, the result is very similar to how Google looked ~15 years ago -- Google News, Froogle, search results, etc. The underlying tech was different, but the result is the same. Google just used C++ and the "google-ctemplate" language.

----

I wish that every food ordering app was written like this.

I mean all they are doing is displaying a list of pictures and then providing a checkout experience -- it's literally eBay from 1998, but 1000x slower.

It would also be like 10x faster than a native app on phone if it were written like that.

In fact Google has a lightning food ordering app right on the search results page that proves the point! However I tend not to use it because I don't think it's good to let the search provider "hijack" the traffic intended for restaurants. i.e. presumably the restaurant will put their preferred vendors on their sites, which is almost never Google, and is instead some really slow and janky app :-(

[Tmpod]

+1 for sourcehut. The people there have been making great, lightweight software for a lot of stuff. Despite looking simple they are often really powerful.

[deltarholamda]

Way back, Conventional Wisdom was "build the site so that people with JS turned off could still use it." This was great advice in 2001, but it's pretty hard to do now. You have to choose what is, and what is not, convenient and/or appropriate for the end user. And that's pretty hard to determine, as there are more varieties of "end users" than atoms in the universe.

Plus, even if you're really careful and make something that is judicious with JS, phone users come in and blow everything up. For example, leaving a review could be done JS free buy opening a dedicated review view, and if the end user needs to refer back to the product, they can open a new tab. It's not so easy with a phone, unless they have really strong phone browser kung fu.

I would have thought that by now we would have settled on broad conventions for most things so nobody would be inventing all new ways of doing the basics. Instead is seems like things are proliferating. If there are any standards, they're top-down things from Big Corporations like Twitter or Google, because they have the muscle to force everybody to use their conventions and like it.