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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

The web bloat is definitely real. There are so many things which could be done with a simple HTML form, and often were, that got replaced with huge bloated JS-obligatory SPAs because... "modern".

Even IM clients were possible without JS, just plain HTML forms and pure applied skill, which I'll leave as exercise for the reader to figure out. I remember using a few HTML-IRC gateways which worked that way.

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Stuff like camera live streams are possible even without HTML. I remember one that used an infinitely-loading GIF. You'd just visit the GIF file directly and it would show you the livestream. It was awesome.

multipart/x-mixed-replace was (and still is?) how IP cameras showed their stream.

> Even IM clients were possible without JS, just plain HTML forms and pure applied skill, which I'll leave as exercise for the reader to figure out.

For the younger generation that didn't get to witness the glorious old days - there were two approaches. The first one is plain old polling which can be done by using "meta refresh" [1], and the second one is chunked responses [2].

IRC was classically done by the latter method, where the server ran essentially one IRC client binary for each requestor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_refresh

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2481858/how-to-make-php-...

Damn, sounds like internet heaven. You really hit the nail on the head with that modern thing. There's just too many devs out there trying to make the next big thing, the next big trend, to make a name for themselves.

There's nothing wrong with people wanting to make a name for themselves, and nothing will really stop people from wanting to do that. If your frustration is people using a certain technology simply for the sake of it being new, you should be focused on convincing them that isn't necessary to make good/useful tech and make a name for themselves, rather than insulting them for having general ambition.

"People thinking the next big thing needs to be built on bloated, hipster tech stacks is bad" makes sense as an argument/complaint. "People shouldn't be trying to build the next big thing" doesn't make as much sense.

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