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jonny

ok genuine question for anti-javascript ppl is the idea that web content should be static or that there's some alternative to doing stuff like buttons and animations and stuff that would have been better? !/

20 Jul 2022 at 19:54 | Open on social.coop
5 comments
brennen

@jonny i don't think of myself as "anti javascript" in a strong categorical sense, but i do think of myself as despairing of web technology for a complex of reasons in which javascript is fairly intertwingled, and i'd say... it's complicated.

some of those reasons:

- browser as platform that's too complex to be re-implemented for less than billions of dollars (and thus, at this point, a locked-in effective monopoly)

(1/2 or so)

20 Jul 2022 at 20:54 | Open on federation.p1k3.com
brennen

@jonny

- browser as host to just a truly staggering amount of fragile & inhumane software development complexity

- barriers to entry to what was once a pretty simple environment to create things in

- necessity of trusting huge amounts of arbitrary and frequently malicious client-side code to participate whatsoever in web

(2/3)

20 Jul 2022 at 20:58 | Open on federation.p1k3.com
brennen

@jonny …and so on. a lot of this was probably latent in the fundamental architecture of the web + the decision to have a language runtime at all.

js *as a language*? it sucks but also there are some neat things. ecosystem is a far bigger problem than the language itself. to a 1st approximation, i could say these things about any language people actually use.

i don't see a reason to think that a different *language* design would have changed most of the things i don't like about the situation.

20 Jul 2022 at 21:02 | Open on federation.p1k3.com
Alex Schroeder

@brennen @jonny yeah, one other point I’d like to add is that JavaScript is fine when writing webapps and the problem is only when everything is an app. Documents have many positive aspects and forcing people to use an app (anything with Javascript) means that almost always the experience degrades: less accessibility, less freedom in layout, theming, archiving, printing, navigation, and so on. The two problems are thus: apps instead of documents, and badly designed apps. In the case of things that are in fact apps that run on the virtual machine that is the browser, I have nothing against Javascript and use it myself. The fact that the virtual machine is super hard to implement and wouldn’t be necessary for simple hypertext online adds insult to injury.

@brennen @jonny yeah, one other point I’d like to add is that JavaScript is fine when writing webapps and the problem is only when everything is an app. Documents have many positive aspects and forcing people to use an app (anything with Javascript) means that almost always the experience degrades: less accessibility, less freedom in layout, theming, archiving, printing, navigation, and so on. The two problems are thus: apps instead of documents, and badly designed apps. In the case of things that...

20 Jul 2022 at 21:25 | Open on octodon.social
jonny

@kensanata
@brennen
documents seem to be one of the major points of contention- like there are some things that js genuinely makes nicer about documents, interactive/overlay tables of contents for one, but also eg. annotation. OTOH that seems to trade off with browser-based answers to those, like a document is very barebones/unstyled and that's up to the reader to do the nav/etc. which has its own tradeoffs

20 Jul 2022 at 21:33 | Open on social.coop
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