[https://old.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/3cfvst/the_number_of_javascript_frameworks_available_is/cswpr3d/]

[–]tommorris 2 points 5 years ago 

>  can't or won't load JavaScript

What, like on an unreliable 3G connection while on public transport?

JavaScript's failure mode is epic unusability: one blob of JSON doesn't load correctly, one Ajax call fails inconveniently, one of the script tags fails to load, one inconvenient syntax error and you get blank screened. That's the opposite of how HTML and CSS were designed: they try to render as much as possible and recover from as many errors as they can.

I used to commute 90 minutes each way to work and dealt with unreliable 3G all the way. The sites that were built with the fanciest and most cutting edge JavaScript frameworks were the ones that failed worst. They'd give me infinite spinny wheels rather than an actual error message. Did my message send? Oh god, fuck no. I'd get to the end of the page and it'd auto-load more content, then when it'd fail, there'd be no way to retry because the moron prick of a designer was sitting at his iMac with a fast reliable net connection and never thought anyone might use the site on a dodgy connection. I'd have to hit refresh a few times to get rid of whatever JavaScript modal shit had broken it. All error messages would be suppressed of course because either they don't make a nice user experience or the developer just hasn't been bothered to write any.

Modern front end practices are great so long as nothing fails: not the internet connection and certainly not the health of the user, because fuck accessibility to hell. Progressive enhancement is just another name for fault tolerance.

And all the whizzy bullshit people build recreated the same performance hell as with Flash. When some genius is maxing out the CPU on my MacBook Pro with canvas animations because they want to recreate a 90s style Flash intro but "in HTML5" because some fucktard told them to do it on Smashing Magzine, that's them putting the user first, right? That'll work on an iPhone more than two revs out of date like the one my parents use. They tested that on Android 2.3, right? Awesome. Slow clap for modern web dev.

> This isn't 2005.

Yep, in 2005, people gave a slight whiff more of a shit about performance and accessibility.

If pagination requires JavaScript, that's truly a smart move. I expect Google will be able to read your archives fine. Oh, wait, no, you then need do all this shit to make it work, which is in essence repeating what you would have done if you'd designed it to work without JavaScript and then layered the JavaScript on top according to the principles of progressive enhancement.

JavaScript to post comments? Why? The form tag exists.

I'm not saying there's no role for JavaScript. But the full Angular front-end crackpipe madness just to read a bloody blog? That's basically everything that's wrong with modern web development.