Comment on nobody in webdev knows what graceful degradation is anymore
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 5 hours agoMaybe 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 3 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.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 1 hour 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.