[starspangled]

What do you use that good javascipt for? And what is the excessive stuff that causes slowness and bloat? I'm not a web programmer, just curious.

[_heimdall]

My rule of thumb is to render HTML where the state actually lives.

In a huge majority of cases I come across that is on the server. Some things really are client-side only though, think temporary state responding to user interactions.

Either way I also try really hard to make sure the UI is at least functional without JS. There are times that isn't possible, but those are pretty rare in my experience.

[graemep]

Two examples that come up a lot for me:

1. filtering a drop down list by typing rather than scrolling through lots of options to pick one 2. Rearranging items with drag and drop

The excessive stuff is requiring a whole lot of scripts and resources to load before you display a simple page of information.

[LtWorf]

Doesn't the combo box input field already do this?

[graemep]

You are right, it does.

A better example would be dynamically loading the list of options where it is very long and loading the entire list would make the page size much larger.