I completely agree that JavaScript is massively overused these days. Speaking of Amazon, most of the time the page loads and I'm still waiting another 10-20 seconds for all the JS to finish loading (Win 10, AMD FX 3ghz, 16GB DDR3, broadband connection - it's old, I know... new build this week). I run a blog about sports. I have writers and advertisers (not just AdSense and the like), and I have a million readers. I use a simple theme, though its JS use still brings my pages over 1MB in size (3MB is the average). That's for text mostly, with a featured image (paid optimizing service for all images) and an embed or two. Thankfully, my target audience is almost exclusively in the US.
While I agree that some features built with JS are fun to look at, I'm amazed every day at the utter lack of function in most of them. It's wasteful.
I think your article focused too much on the developer side of things in that all this JS is more difficult and time consuming. It may be true, but it's also not the point. JS is most often bad for users. About the most I can stand JS is for AJAX page loads and sometimes menus too, though most of those can be done with static markup.
Of course. But you know how these devs are when you go after their precious JS; they'll take any excuse to call you lazy or an inferior developer.
One thing I wanted to add is why I disagree with JS so much: JS offloads page loading to the user's browser, freeing up the server. Seems cheap to me, and makes my browser work harder than it needs to. When it's for personalization, alright, but most JS use isn't for that purpose.
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I completely agree that JavaScript is massively overused these days. Speaking of Amazon, most of the time the page loads and I'm still waiting another 10-20 seconds for all the JS to finish loading (Win 10, AMD FX 3ghz, 16GB DDR3, broadband connection - it's old, I know... new build this week). I run a blog about sports. I have writers and advertisers (not just AdSense and the like), and I have a million readers. I use a simple theme, though its JS use still brings my pages over 1MB in size (3MB is the average). That's for text mostly, with a featured image (paid optimizing service for all images) and an embed or two. Thankfully, my target audience is almost exclusively in the US.
While I agree that some features built with JS are fun to look at, I'm amazed every day at the utter lack of function in most of them. It's wasteful.
I think your article focused too much on the developer side of things in that all this JS is more difficult and time consuming. It may be true, but it's also not the point. JS is most often bad for users. About the most I can stand JS is for AJAX page loads and sometimes menus too, though most of those can be done with static markup.
First time on this site. Great article. Thanks.
Thanks
I definitely was trying to draw the parallels that it all can both be a lot of effort for developers and can make the experience worse for the devs :)
Of course. But you know how these devs are when you go after their precious JS; they'll take any excuse to call you lazy or an inferior developer.
One thing I wanted to add is why I disagree with JS so much: JS offloads page loading to the user's browser, freeing up the server. Seems cheap to me, and makes my browser work harder than it needs to. When it's for personalization, alright, but most JS use isn't for that purpose.