The pursuit of cutting-edge JS frameworks resulted in a less accessible web

This rant is at least ten years out of date, and is at this point entirely unimaginative. More importantly it does not represent where JS ecosystem efforts have been going for 3-5 years. My personal site is built with a JS framework. It’s sent to the client as ‘static’ HTML and CSS. A JS payload is also sent to power (optional) client-side-interactive functionality (e.g. the “copy” button on code snippet blocks).<p>Meanwhile, I get to use what is easily the best ecosystem of (lowercase) web component &#x2F; templating tools, hands down. I’ve used more templating tools than I can count, and nothing compares to Vue SFCs, Svelte, or hell, even JSX as much as I loathe it.<p>I’m a fairly oldschool do-it-in-notepad web developer, not some kid that grew up on JavaScript. I’ve been deeply, deeply skeptical of and hesitant to employ JS-ecosystem tools. The recent work around fairly seamless isomorphic development is slowly but surely winning me over. It’s increasingly addressing my concerns re accessibility, performance, reliability, semantics, ‘letting the browser do what it does best’, etc. All things I deeply, deeply care about, and all things that caused me to rail against JavaScript in the past.

Sure, but with things like React Server Components, the complexity and payload is pushed back onto the server while still leveraging fine grained client side effects, which is why RSCs are <i>not</i> like PHP, at least not at scale for build large applications with lots of interactivity.

This post doesn’t go remotely far enough.<p>The genius of the web was its focus on documents: GET, POST, UPDATE, DELETE. Authoring and sharing text and images and video is essential to human knowledge and the web’s big contribution to the world was creating a fairly simple, universally understandable format for people to read and publish documents. The idea of the separation of information from presentation (and putting presentation in the control of the user-agent) was genius and lead to some of the biggest forms of innovation built on top of the web like RSS and podcasting. The gradual evolution of the web away from a hyperlinked network of documents towards being a thin frame into which we deliver complex software applications mostly destroyed so much of this value. It’s convenient for engineers but often deeply hostile to users and has lead to a systematic disregard for what was unique and special about the web. How easy do you find it to discover interesting or useful information created by actual people nowadays vs, say, 2007? Web engineers have largely destroyed one of the great human information technologies in order to make it easier to ship software. Good job everyone.

Javascript was&#x2F;is a mistake.

one could theoretically replace traditional web interfaces with LLMs.