Mildly Infuriating

Blame the ui frameworks like react for this. It’s normalized a large cross-section of devs not learning anything about how a server works. They’ve essentially grown up with a calculator without ever having to learn long division.

You’re correct, and I’m going to explain how this happens. I’m not justifying that it happens, just explaining it.

It isn’t that no one knows what graceful degradation is anymore. It’s that they don’t try to serve every browser that’s existed since the beginning of time.

When you develop software, you have to make some choices about what clients you’re going to support, because you then need to test for all those clients to ensure you haven’t broken their experience.

With ever-increasing demands for more and more software delivery to drive ever greater business results, developers want to serve as few clients as possible. And they know exactly what clients their audience use - this is easy to see and log.

This leads to conversations like: can we drop browser version X? It represents 0.4% of our audience but takes the same 10% of our testing effort as the top browser.”

And of course the business heads making the demands on their time say yes, because they don’t want to slow down new projects by 10% over 0.4% of TAM. The developers are happy because it’s less work for them and fewer bizarre bugs to deal with from antiquated software.

Not one person in this picture will fight for your right to turn off JavaScript just because you have some philosophy against it. It’s really no longer the “scripting language for animations and interactivity” on top of HTML like it used to be. It’s the entire application now. 🤷‍♂️

If it helps you to blame the greedy corporate masters who want to squeeze more productivity out of their engineering group, then think that. It’s true. But it’s also true that engineers don’t want to work with yesteryear’s tech or obscure client cases, because that experience isn’t valuable for their career.

Most don't even know @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark/light), rather cobble something with JS that works half of the time and needs buttons to toggle.

If it's a standard webpage that only displays some static content, then sure.

But everything that needs to be interactive (and I'm talking about actual interactivity here, not just navigation) requires Javascript and it's really not worth the effort of implementing fallbacks for everything just so you can tell your two users who actually get to appreciate this effort that the site still won't work because the actual functionallity requires JavaScript.

It all comes down to what the customer is ready to pay for and usually they're not ready to pay for anything besides core functionallity. Heck, I'm having a hard enough time getting budget for all the legally required accessibility. And sure, some of that no script stuff pays into that as well, but by far not everything.

Stuff like file uploads, validated forms and drag and drop are just not worth the effort of providing them without JS.

I don't know anything about web development but, is it really fair to say it should work exactly the same with JavaScript turned off? If that were achievable why would it be there in the first place? I assume the graceful degradation concept is supposed to be that as you strip away more and more layers of additional functionality, the core functions remain or at least some kind of explanation is given to the user why things don't work.

I wrote my CV site in React and Next.js configured for SSG (Static Site Generation) which means that the whole site loads perfectly without JavaScript, but if you do have JS enabled you'll get a theme switching and print button.

That said, requiring JS makes sense on some sites, namely those that act more like web apps that let you do stuff (like WhatsApp or Photopea). Not for articles, blogs etc. though.

It's worse than this even. I have an old Raspberry Pi 3B+ (1G) that I got in 2018. I hooked it up the other day to mess around with it, it's been maybe 2 years since I did anything with it, ever since I got a Pi 4 (4G). 1 gigabyte of RAM is now insufficient to browse the web. The machine freezes when loading any type of interactive site. Web dev is now frameworks piled on frameworks with zero consideration for overhead and it's pure shit. Outrageous.

Funny, from my standpoint, more functional JavaScript almost always feels like service degradation - as in, the more I block, the better and the faster the website runs.

I’ve spent the last year building a Lemmy and PieFed client that requires JavaScript. This dependency on JavaScript allows me to ship you 100% static files, which after being fully downloaded, have 0 dependency on a web server. Without JavaScript, my cost of running web servers would be higher, and if I stopped paying for those servers, the client would stop working immediately. Instead, I chose to depend heavily on JavaScript which allows me to ship a client that you can fully download, if you choose, and run on your own computer.

As far as privacy, when you download my Threadiverse client* and inspect network requests, you will see that most of the network requests it makes are to the Lemmy/PieFed server you select. The 2 exceptions being any images that aren’t proxied via Lemmy/PieFed, and when you login, I download a list of the latest Lemmy servers. If I relied on a web server for rendering instead of JavaScript, many more requests would be made with more opportunities to expose your IP address.

I truly don’t understand where all this hate for JavaScript comes from. Late stage capitalism, AI, and SAS are ruining the internet, not JavaScript. Channel your hate at big tech.

*I deliver both web and downloadable versions of my client. The benefits I mentioned require the downloaded version. But JavaScript allows me to share almost 100% code between the web and downloaded versions. In the future, better PWA support will allow me to leverage some of these benefits on web.

I, as a user, should be able to switch off javascript and have the site work exactly as it does with javascript turned on.

I mean… many websites rely on JavaScript, so it's kind of obvious that they don't work without it. If it would work without JS in the first place, the website wouldn't need to embed any JS code.

JavaScript is needed to actually build anything useful. It is way easier to maintain and when done properly it can be very fast to load and use.

The problem with today's web is that pages are extremely inefficient and bloated. You can keep the same UI just don't try to use every framework and library under the sun. Also it would be nice if people actually formated assets properly instead of using tons of large images and other assets.

Graceful degradation - pfft.

Progressive enhancement - yeah!

To balance it out, I made it so that my web pages fail to load if JavaScript is turned on. Yes, really.

Okay, I guess technically it shows a message that says "Turn off JS, dummy!", but it's the same in spirit.

I don't know how you're gonna get everything to work without JavaScript. You can't do a lot of interactivity stuff without it.

Fair, some websites do need JavaScript though. Such as webapps. Could they be server-side rendered?

I thought graceful degradation in terms of web design was mostly just to promote using the latest current browser features but to allow it to fall back to the feature set of, say, 1 or 2 previous browser versions. Not to support a user completely turning off a feature that has been around for literal decades? I think what you're promoting is the "opposite" side, progressive enhancement, where the website should mostly work through the most basic, initial features and then have advanced features added later for supported browsers.

Not even possible to reply to this post using the Lemmy Web UI without having Javascript enabled; the reply button doesn't function without Javascript.

i, as a user, should be able to switch off javascript and have the site work exactly as it does with javascript turned on

Not agreeing or disagreeing, but why?

Yeah, it should also work without browser exactly as it does with a browser

Some surely know, they just don't care.