On 03/27/2015 06:51 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
I've been reading through the discussion thread, all of which seems to
jump immediately into the weeds of specific details of the proposal.
I'm amazed that nobody has yet commented on the implicit premise, which
I read as:
- JavaScript is a processing pig
- with the addition of a few, well-defined constructs to HTML, with
support from browsers, we could do a lot of what we want (or what people
are doing) - without the overhead imposed by JavaScript
To me, this seems like a very good thing. It seems like:
- It's getting harder and harder to do simple things. Too many
JavaScript frameworks and libraries. Too much complexity. Authoring
should not require extensive programming skills. (Whatever happened to
the read/write web?).
- JavaScript seems to encourage poor programming style, or at least
resource-intensive programming. It seems like 2/3 of the web pages I
visit either freeze up, or just take incredibly long to load. Granted,
that a lot of this is this stems from all the little click monitoring
apps, and widgets, and who knows what else people put on their pages -
and waiting for those various sites to respond - but it's the
proliferation of more and more JavaScript that enables this.
In HTML5 some functionality ordinarily provided by JavaScript that now
can be done by HTML5, e.g. the details tag and progress tag, is still
not universally supported by modern browsers requiring JavaScript fallback.
I don't know why it takes the browsers so long to implement, but it does.
The problem with JavaScript is that fewer and fewer web devs care.
Rather than picking a framework (like jQuery) and sticking with it, they
copypasta JS they find around the web (often in violation of the
license) and add whatever framework that snippet depends upon.
Few people care about passing their JS through tools like JSLint, and
many pages still have dozens of external JS references as well as
numerous inline scripts.
They just don't care. And that is hard to fix with standards because
they don't care.
