Hey, I’ve read exactly the same article 15 years ago, but back then it was Flash that “broke the web”.
and we got rid of it.
Flash never got in the way the same like js. My main take from the whole piece is how it has changed the way websites are developed, to match that of traditional software development. Like the need to deploy to change some text in the footer of our website
Client-side scripting is a hack. HTML didn’t have all the tags people wanted or needed, so instead of carefully updating it to include new features, they demanded that browsers just execute arbitrary code on the user’s computer, and with that comes security vulnerabilities, excessive bandwidth use and a barrier-to-entry that makes it difficult to develop new browsers, giving one company a near-monopoly.
Developers wanted to build and deploy apps to end user machines. The round trip for page loads was lousy for usability.
Java applets were too shitty. Flash was too janky and hard to work with. So Mozilla started adding JavaScript as a hack. It filled a need.
a barrier-to-entry that makes it difficult to develop new browsers,
It definitely adds a barrier to entry, but JavaScript was really perfected in chromium, which is a different codebase from the folks who proposed and built js to begin with.
I’m not saying JavaScript is good, but it fills a need.
