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by sham1 779 days ago
Personally I don't think that the problem is that JS makes the web a more colourful and dynamic experience, but that the vast majority of that colourfulness and dynamism is just not good.

Hijacking the user's scroll, rendering the entire website content on JS at client-side (although the emergence of SSR has made this less of an issue. Who knew that not rendering all the things on the client device makes things better, I'm shocked…) and SPAs more generally (GitHub for example is so jank and annoyingly slow nowadays, it's just irritating), doing things like buttons and links with a `<div>` with an `onClick` instead of using the appropriate markup, et cetera.

Of course, many of these things are exactly opposite to the actual best web development practices. But why, then, is this shite so prevalent‽ It's also bad for things like accessibility, with screen-reader users and such sometimes struggling majorly because of myriads of badly developed web applications. Meanwhile a standard HTML document, with some CSS and maybe some JS for progressive enhancement just works. Of course, I know that many use cases require far more interactivity and dynamism than that, but is it such a big burden to not make the user experience worse with bollocks like reinventing browser scrolling?

1 comments

A sad thing about the Github situation is that, until some months ago, it was perfectly fine for browsing directory tres and clicking to view files on the web, all that worked without javascript. Now it doesn't, except perhaps for the top-level and its README.

That's a shame, I used that a lot for quick browsing, checking and/or comparison of code in repositories hosted by Github.