Comment on nobody in webdev knows what graceful degradation is anymore
Armand1@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
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.
Azzu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 hours ago
I mean yes, but Whatsapp is a bad example. It could easily use no JavaScript. In the end it’s the same as Lemmy or any other forum, you post a message, get a new page with the message. Switching chats is loading a new site. Of course JavaScript enhances the experience, makes it more fluid, etc, but messengers would work perfectly fine without JavaScript.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 16 hours ago
Maybe I’m out of the loop because I do mostly backend, but how do you update the chat window when new chats come in, without JavaScript?
Azzu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 hours ago
You don’t, I’m saying it would still mostly work. Getting messages as they arrive is nice but not necessary. For example, I personally have all notifications off, and I only see messages when I specifically look for them, no one can reach me instantly. Everyone seems to be missing that we’re talking about degradation here, it degrades, it gets worse with JS disabled. But it shouldn’t straight up not work.
A good example for something that does not work without JS would have been a drawing application like they said, or games, there are plenty of things that literally do not work without JS, but messaging is not one of them. Instant messaging would be of course.
XM34@feddit.org 10 hours ago
Did you just propose degrading instant messengers back into email? 😂
How exactly do you propose people actually chat with such a system? Continuously hammering F5 while being actively engaged with another person? 😂
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
I also feel like everyone seems to be missing that we’re taking about degradation, which isn’t usually “no js at all”, it’s some subset that isn’t supported. People use feature detection to find out of some feature is supported in the browser and if it’s not the they don’t enable the feature the depends on it.
For the chat example, you could argue that a chat can degrade into a bulletin board, but I’d argue that people use chat for realtime messaging so js is needed for the base use case.
If your webpage primarily just displays static information, then I agree that it should work without js or css. Like Wikipedia, or a blog, or news, or a product marketing page, or a forum/BBS.
But there is a huge part of the web that this simply doesn’t apply to, and it’s not realistic to have them put in huge effort to support what can only be a broken experience for a fraction of a percent of users.
Kache@lemmy.zip 16 hours ago
How would a page fetch new messages for you without JS?
Vigge93@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
You don’t. That’s the gracefully degradation part. You can still read your chat history and send new messages, but receiving messages as they come requires page reload or enabling js.
Pika@sh.itjust.works 15 hours ago
my only issue with this ideology is, this setup would essentially require a whole new processing system to handle, as instead of it being sent via events, it would need to be rendered and sent server side. This also forces the server to load everything at once instead of dynamically like how it currently does, which will increase strain/load on the server node that is displaying the web page, while also removing the potential of service isolation between the parts of the web page meaning if one component goes down(such as chat history), the entire page handler goes down, while also decreasing page response and load times. That’s the downside of those old legacy style pages. They are a pain in the ass to maintain, run slower and don’t have much fallover ability.
jannis@quadball.app 11 hours ago
How would you solve end-to-end encryption without JavaScript?