[tomjen3]

>but everyone who's relied on it exclusively has learned the hard way that it's just too unreliable and slow to have a failure mode which is an empty page unless a lot of complex code works perfectly.

FUD. I develop HTML5 gambling for a living and this anti-javascript sentiment on HN is getting really tiresome. You honestly sound like a bunch of old people, complaining that a PC isn't a typewriter or a fountain pen.

Yeah your fountain pen doesn't require power and it writes your name really well, but that doesn't mean that the PC isn't better.

Client side rendering means you will have to test in all browsers, writing android apps means you have to test on a lot of units.

[acdha]

You rather spectacularly missed the point: I wasn't saying not to do the fancy stuff but rather to start with something which degrades well and then have your JavaScript enhance that basic experience.

If you want to know why this is a good idea, you should start using something like getsentry.com or errorception.com to record your JavaScript errors. That won't tell you who couldn't execute JavaScript at all but it'll show how many times something didn't load due to a flaky ISP, adware, buggy anti-virus, odd browser settings, etc. With progressive enhancement, those people still have a reasonable chance of at least seeing the content on the page. With a pure JS approach, they're only going to see a blank and will probably be heading over to a competitor whose site degrades well.

(Note that this is only the question of the site working at all. In most cases, the progressive site will also render considerably faster – Twitter found an 80% improvement! – since the pure-JS approach breaks the browser's prefetch optimizations and requires much more work to achieve comparable performance)

[wtbob]

> I develop HTML5 gambling for a living and this anti-javascript sentiment on HN is getting really tiresome.

I've been using websites since the early 90s and this pro-single-page sentiment is getting really tiresome. You are breaking the web. You are destroying users' security.

Sure, there are plenty of reasons to use JavaScript, and plenty of places where it's appropriate. It probably is a good idea for games and so forth. But requiring users to load and execute constantly-changing code from across the web in order to read a page or submit a form is in-friggin-sane.

Some one else pointed out that it'd be nice if browsers offered more support for things that certain types of developers clearly want to do. I completely agree; it'd definitely be nice to take advantage of many of the technologies which currently exist to do more, in a more structured way. But requiring code execution in order to read data is madness.