Comment by ironmagma
1 day ago
This is definitely a surprising opinion to find on HN. Usually the prevailing thought is that anything that is even remotely heavy on JavaScript is bad design and therefore inherently unusable, unportable, etc. Whereas this is essentially JavaScript maximalism.
Part of it is that so many sites are JS heavy in a way which brings basically nothing to the table.. it's just JS for JS' sake, and sometimes a static web site would work just as well for the user.
I think it depends. I basically see the web as two parts, "web documents" (usually called "websites") and "web apps" (usually just called apps), and it makes sense that web apps that require lots of interactivity (think drag and drop) would use lots of JavaScript, I don't people have a problem with image editors or map viewers being made more simple by the use of JS for example.
The friction occurs when people building a website for web documents think they should be building a web app, so you end up with a scaffolding that requires heavy JS just to serve what essentially is just text + maybe one or two images. The additional JS doesn't really save the user any time or pain, it just makes everything larger and harder to consume.
I write a lot of code myself and am usually against indiscriminate use of JS (so much so that I now recommend old fashioned server side templates over SPAs unless there is a good reason). But for this comment, I was donning my other hat: that of an executive with whom the decision to adopt (and pay for) a product usually rests. The bulk of a SaaS company's marketing budget goes to attracting and retaining the attention of such people, and ultimately getting them to pay. I feel this site does a good job of that without wasting my time.
You are jumping from a discussion about UI design to one about technology and implementation.
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Perhaps the amount of JavaScript used in a website is not a contributing factor into how usable a person finds it /s.
Honestly, you don't judge a back-end by how much code it's built with or what platform it's hosted on. I don't get the obsession people have with JavaScript used on websites. Websites with terrible UX often abuse JavaScript yes, but correlation != causation.
It’s because they can see it.
They can go in the inspector and see “oh wow so many MBs of JS”, but they can’t see the backend.
There is a good point to that: this data that is downloaded is an end user resource. Over a mobile network etc it’ll matter. But the days where it mattered at home/office are long, long gone, at least for the audience of the websites that adopt this strategy.
The obsession I believe is a remnant of these old days. There was a transitionary period still a decade ago (when hn was already not that young) where users would spend time loading a website, then complain about the amount of js on the page and how that is unnecessary. The connections got upgraded but nothing strikes down a habit…
More like they can see it but also can't see it. There's megabytes of JS loaded just to show me a crappy glorified PDF that doesn't even work properly. A page I could have literally made using only HTML and CSS and it would be better, but somehow you've made it take 11mb of JavaScript code and it doesn't even work properly. That's the kind of website I scoff at.
I have no issues at all with this website. It's awesome. I mean it's a bit slow but that's probably because it's on the front page on HN right now - yet it still works pretty well. The design is delightful. Incredibly well done. One of the coolest websites I've seen. Who cares how much JS it takes, it's obviously worth it.