Comment on nobody in webdev knows what graceful degradation is anymore
moseschrute@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
monobot@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Problem is so many websites are slow for no good reason.
And JS is being used to steal our info and push aggressive advertisment.
Which part is unknown to you?
moseschrute@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I don’t understand why we are blaming the stealing info part on JavaScript and not the tech industry. Here is an article on how you can be tracked (fingerprinted) even with JavaScript disabled. As for slow websites, also blame the tech industry for prioritizing their bottom line over UX and not investing in good engineering.
Infinite@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Problem is so many trains are ugly for no good reason.
And steel is being used to shoot people and stab people aggressively.
cley_faye@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Bad coding is a part of it. “It works on my system, where the server is local and I’m opening the page on my overclocked gamer system”. Bad framework is also a part of it. React, for example, decided that running code is free, and bloated their otherwise very nice system to hell. It’s mildly infuriating moving from a fast, working solution to something that decided to implements basic language features as a subset of the language itself.
Trackers, ads, dozen (if not hundreds) of external resources, are also a big part of it. Running decent request blocking extensions (stuff like ublock origin) adds a lot of work to loading a page, and still makes them seems more reactive because of the sheer amount of blocked resources. It’s night and day.