Comment by oneeyedpigeon
4 days ago
I don't even know where to begin with the pretence that you can compare HTML with JS and somehow conclude that one is 'better' than the other. They are totally different things. JS is for functionality, and if you're using it to serve static content, you're not using it as designed.
I don't particularly care about "designed for". If you've got to serve something to make the browser display the static content you want it to, the least unpleasant way to do so is with JS.
Least unpleasant to the developer. Most unpleasant to the user. It breaks all kinds of useful browser features (which frontend devs then recreate from scratch in JS, poorly; that's probably the most widespread variant of Greenspun's tenth rule in practice).
> It breaks all kinds of useful browser features (which frontend devs then recreate from scratch in JS, poorly; that's probably the most widespread variant of Greenspun's tenth rule in practice).
Nah, it's the opposite. JS tends to perform better and be more usable for the same level of feature complexity (people who want more complex sites, for good reasons or bad, tend to use JS, but if you compare like with like), HN just likes to use them as a stick to reinforce their prejudices. (E.g. if you actually test with a screenreader, aria labels work better than "semantic" HTML tags)
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