JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

> Hacker News however?

While being completely useless on mobile, with tiny buttons and textarea, which could be fixed while barely making the whole thing larger.

This is the 'no true Scotsman' argument.

"Websites that use JS are terrible and broken."

"Your website uses a ton of JS."

"JS is fine in my case. It's all those other websites that are broken!"

You can implement a captcha without JS. You don't need jQuery or jQuery-migrate in 2025. The site is using Quill for some typography tweaks that could mostly be done in CSS.

FWIW I don't think there's anything wrong with the way the site is built. It looks nice. It loads pretty fast. JS is great - it enables a bunch of capabilities for things that you can't do on a web page without it, and if you're looking for something very specific or hugely interactive it's essential. But I can make that argument because I'm not saying JS is bad. If you say JS is bad and you use it anyway for things you don't really need you're undermining your own point quite a lot.

Why does a blog post need a captcha?

Absolutely, do as I say not as I do.

JavaScript employment always felt like a spoons versus shovels type story.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/milton-friedman-shovels-vs-sp...

If you cannot do the job without things like React, Angular, or jquery you may not be qualified to write that code. On a bigger level if you cannot create an original application from scratch you aren’t a senior developer and if you don’t measure things you aren’t an engineer.

Nearly every other professional line of work has solved for this with some combination of licensing and/or broker/agent model. Developers tend to be scared shitless of industrial baselines of qualification assessments.

Again, I am saying all this as someone who wrote JavaScript for employment for 15 years and still love writing in the language.

Well, paraphrasing Hegel, we can learn from past failures that the industry as a whole does not learn from past failures. It's just the Eternal September situation, and all we can do is tend our own gardens.

> the amount of em dashes

… means absolutely nothing. I’ve been heavily using them for decades at this point.

The article itself may or may not be AI-generated, but we cannot penalise folks for simply using a stylish bit of punctuation.

I would argue that em dashes themselves are not the giveaway that people think they are, and I wish they weren't discriminated against like this.

I was focusing more on what you called "among other things". The way that the article uses English is extremely characteristic of, say, ChatGPT.

Why are em dashes a giveaway? They’re auto inserted on Windows for two hyphens still, aren’t they?

As someone who makes a living by writing, this myth about em dashes is annoying. I have always used them. But now I have to avoid them so clients don't think my work is AI-generated.

I don't believe this article is largely AI-generated. It reads to me like the work of every marketer who has learned a list of "best practices" and sticks to them rigorously. It's probably also been edited so it aligns with Grammarly's or Hemingway's view of good writing.

Plus, some people seem to think that any polished, professional writing is LLM-ish because that's the style LLMs often imitate (badly).

You don't need to be an AI to use em-dashes. I actually use them quite a lot (even outside of Word) and AFAIK I am not an AI. I just care about text layout and proper use of characters. — is Alt-0151 on Windows (ok you need a keyboard with numeric pad).

Yeah true especially if you were trying to use Typescript. Every npm update broke things.

> In reality, it's almost always resume-driven development

This is what drives me crazy. I’ve been at my company for a couple decades. I want stability and long term health of the company.

The resume driven development isn’t even from the engineers, it’s from the leadership. An IT leader gets hired from the outside, starts a big project that will look good on the resume, then midway through the project, they are just far enough to try and call it a success and leverage it into a new position. Now we have a leadership change in the middle of a giant foundational shift of the infrastructure. The new leader comes in and does the same thing. I don’t see how a company can survive this long term. It creates such fragility. People like me, with little interest in job hopping, aren’t looking to resume build. I’m looking to have the company’s operations run smoothly so customers have a reliable service, so we retain them as customers… and for a little peace and stability myself. These resume building leaders make that difficult and seem to actively work against the long term health of the company. They aren’t interested in the next 10-20 years, they are only worried about their next job in 3-4 years, with no concern for the mess they leave behind.

I hope this is just a trend and it dies soon. The needless stress it has brought into my once simple life has been rather unpleasant.

It may be resume-driven, but that's the state of the world. If you fail to keep your team members and attract new ones as the team needs to grow, you are fighting a losing battle.

the main reasons for my preference are that: gmail/fastmail are simple, I can use from multiple computers easily, have good defaults and most importantly, they almost always work. Outlook users seem to constantly have something broken.

I do realise that i am reaping the benefits of a centralised system, and in the case of gmail, monetised by advertising, surveillance and user lock-in. Probably the ideal for me would would be a self-hosted web client, e.g. Mailcow

This is largely because all of these frameworks are a collection of hacks to get Jacascript to do things it was never designed to do.

It seems if we want to have single page application that act like desktop apps, maybe we need a new language/technology that browsers can handle that is designed for this.

Maybe WASM is supposed to be the answer there, but it doesn’t feel like it (I haven’t really looked into it much). These JS frameworks have had way too much time to get out of hand without something coming in to fundamentally change things to make them obsolete. I worry this whole generation was raised on complexity, with nearly unlimited compute, and they lack the limitations which led to some of the more elegant solutions of the past. Though I could just be wearing rose colored glasses.

While a lot of pages would be well served by going back to a more traditional style, there are web apps that require more, and in lieu of a better alternative, people are going to keep hacking more frameworks around JS to make it happen.

I think the fact that it's a horrible language is a big contributor to the frameworks being horrible as well. There's all these incidental sacrifices that have to be made which bleed through into everything else, like handling null and undefined.

Again, none of this is down to SPA frameworks (other than back/forward history APIs, lot of people break this unfortunately, though I've never understood how they manage to as I've never had this problem on projects I worked on). What often happens also is that people embed a bunch of iframes, and history within iframes can act very weirdly.

Links in Vue Router at least are just regular <a> tags. Yes the framework handles navigation when clicking these, but nothing prevents anyone from wrapping anything they want in an <a> tag even with no JS. You could make an entire table be clickable as a link if you wanted to, framework or not. "Legacy" HTML will render these just fine and browsers will make it a regular link, even though HTML validators will fail it.

Literally the first element anyone makes in frameworks will be a generic Button element that is simply a <button> with some styling. People abuse divs as buttons with or without frameworks because again, nothing prevents you from making any arbitrary element in your DOM have an onclick handler and act as a button. Tabbing through can even work with the correct ARIA attributes, and can even be broken on regular plain <button>s if abused hard enough.

I would seriously suggest people try out Vue or especially Svelte, they're about as simple as you can possibly get (especially Svelte 4) while giving you a lot of power and flexibility. I've worked with plenty of server-rendered apps in the past, and trust me, people would butcher things just as badly and easily there.

I wholehartly disagree - all of the mentioned problems are problems created by the developer. All these things work with the common SPA frameworks - developer just tend to forget what an anchor or a button is and use a span or div for it.

Having the proper tool and using the tool properly are two different things - and the web is a place where people forgot to do things the proper way.

The problem is that it is at least 4x easier get everything wrong using an SPA.

All the SPA frameworks handle browser history and links correctly.

I find this a strange way of thinking on a site called "hacker" news...

In my opinion there is NO problem. We have powerful tools that give you freedom and the possibility of tinkering. Some people will use it in ways one doesn't like, but as long as you have some possibility to use other products I think it is great.

I wouldn't trust anybody (including myself) to decide for all others what are the powers that should be given or not. The web architecture is amazing exactly because it allows everybody to build without some large body/organization/company imposing most rules.

This is nonsense, any language makes it possible to crash a program but somehow it's only an issue for JavaScript

bandwidth is not the problem. latency is.

a site where every interaction requires an http request and a reload of the page performs much worse over low latence than an SPA that is designed with a local first approach where all interaction is local and data requests happen in the background.

not all SPAs are designed like that. but none of the traditional sites are designed like that either because they can't.

take hackernews as an example. in order to write a reply i have to click a link, wait for the page to load, click submit, wait for the submission to complete and for the updated page to load.

i live with bad internet. submissions and pageloads on hackernews frequently time out.

with an SPA the first click would open a text field without any server request at all, and submit would happen in the background while i can keep reading. and it can be repeated if it fails without me noticing and having to worry about it.

likewise updating for new messages could happen in the background without me having to wait for a page load. on top of that new messages could show up in a different color without having to track that in the server.

A low-end Android phone that is 100 times as fast as a Cray 1, yet still can't load a blog post.