as someone with no experience working in this field, but lots of experience browsing and using the web, allow me to make a claim as to the state of web development:
i know. horror. shock and awe. terrible thing to say. javascript is the bedrock of modern webdev. it's the backbone of the modern web as a whole. this is the problem.
these days, it's not uncommon for a webpage to be completely generated by javascript. in one sense, this seems extremely efficient. no need to have someone work out how to make a page look a certain way, that's done by the js. same for everything else. unfortunately, running and holding all of these scripts takes a lot of data. megabytes worth of javascript coming down the pipeline to make the page look all pretty. the cost? load times, excessive use of system resources, and immense susceptibility to hacking.
me, fucker, that's who. i can't count the number of times i've loaded up a website and had to sit and wait---sometimes for upwards of ten seconds---for anywhere from several tens to hundreds of megabytes worth of scripts to be delivered to and executed on my machine. this is ridiculous. do not misunderstand me, either. javascript is really useful for beautifying webpages, which i generally think is fine. but when your literal entire website is written in and generated on-demand by the execution of a jenga tower of javascript, i start to look at you like you've lost the plot. what's so bad about typing a webpage out in your text editor?
not to mention, you can't execute arbitrary commands when your site is written in html, with only visual elements handled by javascript. it feels backwards to chase beauty when not only is html with accent by javascript plenty beautiful, it is simpler and less barrier-laden for newbies to the field. it is nearly impossible to get a handle on webdev basics these days because basics have been supplanted in favor of stacks upon stacks of react and hooks and this and that, rather than the quite simple, less-obtuse-than-ever html5. pretty much every resource on html eventually directs the reader to one of the bloated javascript frameworks that have been pushed endlessly by multi-billion-dollar corporations, who seem to think that they know best for the web. an all-too-familiar sight, in my opinion. javascript frameworks do not exist to make webdev easier to learn or websites easier to use. conversely, it introduces massive barriers to entry to both learning how to use the tools, as well as what you can use to access the web. simple web pages are being used to artificially deprecate older computers so that manufacturers can push you to buy a new computer.
this. this website can be done. it contains no javascript components at all, but i'm not a complete purist. perhaps later on i'll include some inline scripts, or perhaps a site-wide script to handle mobile view. but i will never use react, i will never use angular, i will never infect this site with the very thing i think is making websites worse to use and develop. so go out there and write some pure html. it might just do you some good.
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