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by overgard 1128 days ago
I don't know, when I think about the majority of the sites I visit daily, it's pretty much just content. Like, let's see:

- Stack Overflow

- Hacker News

- Reddit

- Youtube

- Various news blogs

- Gmail

- Shopping/Amazon

- Maps

With the exception of maps, pretty much all of that would be perfectly fine server side rendered (and a lot is, I think). Even gmail would be fine that way, tbh I find it kind of annoying that things like the back button work in unexpected ways.

Things I don't do often but which would be fine server side even though they're SPAs:

- Taxes. Turbotax is very smooth and fancy, but frankly if it gets my taxes done quickly I just don't care that much.

Stuff that's heavy in JS, but which is pretty far weighted content-wise:

- Twitter

- Facebook

- Instagram

Also, a lot of the things that are essentially "web apps" I end up using the desktop/electron version anyway, like Slack or VSCode.

I really think most sites would be better if JS was kept to the bare minimum. The things that actually act like applications often end up with a desktop electron version anyway.

1 comments

None of these sites on your list would be operable without JavaScript, even with reduced functionality. Heck Hacker News, probably the gold standard for simple websites, would itself be unusable. You wouldn't even be able to get the upvote/downvote buttons to work.
> Heck Hacker News, probably the gold standard for simple websites, would itself be unusable. You wouldn't even be able to get the upvote/downvote buttons to work.

Hacker News upvote/downvote buttons work without Javascript

I was under the impression that a few versions ago, links got a "ping" feature. Having an upvote icon become a link with a "/#" href would keep it from refreshing, and the ping would send data about the vote.

I'm not entirely sure that sort of feature requires javascript at all.

It wasn't sait _without_ but with _reduced_ JS.

JS is fine for dynamic contents (likes, upvotes) but the rest of the page can be completely static...

Do you really need to see likes being updated in realtime? Or infinite scrolling (instead of sane pagination)?

That's why I said a minimum of JS, not none. You don't need 500KB of frameworks for an upvote button