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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

It's not the fault of JavaScript the language, but JavaScript as the name we give to the parts of a web page that are not HTML and not CSS.

And it's not really "living is the leading cause of death"; most of that JavaScript is superfluous garbage - ad scripts, trackers, bloated frameworks. You don't need this for a page to serve a socially useful purpose. You just need someone in your company with enough clout, who's willing to say, "out of respect for our users and for engineering as a practice, we will not partake in the latest iteration of the insanity that is the modern web".

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You need to be pretty damn high up in a company to overrule the business reasons for trackers, and perhaps more critically, helpdesk widgets. The size of the very common Zendesk widget is obscene.

You might not be high enough in a large company, but in smaller companies and startups, an employee-level pushback can go a long way.

> You don't need this for a page to serve a socially useful purpose.

You don't need JS to "serve a socially useful purpose" most of the time, as well.

As I said, it seems we decided that everything needs to feel like an app.

95%(yes, I'm probably exaggerating) of the actual value of the today's websites could be plain documents with links to each other.

But try and suggest to anyone you're gonna have a company presence site(or anything for that matter) with no JS at all, and see where it gets you.

I feel it's too late to escape the web browser being established as an application distribution platform - though if you're building a document, then you it to your users and your own dignity, to make it like a document, not an application. Most websites are more like documents than apps.

But my comment applies to apps as well - just because you need to write actual software, doesn't mean you should throw away sensible engineering, and produce a bloated, user-hostile, spying & battery-devouring monster. Yet this is what seems to be coming out of most web shops these days.

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