Web development

Tim Kadlec is the author of several books about different aspects of modern web development. In this blog post he goes in details (and numbers) about the cost at which our reliance on the various JavaScript frameworks comes to our users, customers, website visitors. The data is from the year 2020 when this article was published, but the things have only got worse since then.

Netscape Communicator 4.8 was the latest (or better to say, the last) version of the Communicator software suit from the August 2002. Besides the web browser, Netscape Navigator, it contained email client, a calendar, and a very capable and well designed WYSIWYG HTML editor, Netscape Composer, that was producing surprisingly sane code comparing to its main competitors at that time: Microsoft Frontpage and Macromedia Dreamweaver.

A great compilation of statistical data about PHP use in the wild and a short link list that further proves that PHP as the back-end language of the internet is far from being in decline or even stagnation.

This is a really cool thing, that is not complex at all: the whole site packed in a single HTML file. Pages are wrapped into <section> HTML tag, each with its own ID and linked with inner links, anchors. By default, all sections are hidden, but they become visible with the help of CSS :target selector.

<section id="home">
...
</section>

<section id="page">
...
</section>

<section id="blog"> 
...        
</section>

The whole “code” for the website to work fits into three CSS rules:

section {
	...
	display: none;
	position: absolute;
	top: 0;
	min-height: 100vh;
	width: 100%;
}

section:target { /* Show section */
	display: block;
}

section#home { /* Show #home by default */
	display: block;
}

It will even work with a sane number of images when using loading="lazy" to instruct the browser not to load images unless they are to become visible. When such “website” is meant to be distributed via any kinds of file sharing and accessed locally, both CSS and images can be embedded into HTML to make it truly single HTML file easy to move around.

Only 0.2% of people intentionally block JavaScript, concludes Nathaniel from endtimes.dev in his blog post “Why your website should work without JavaScript.”

His analysis shows that roughly 1% are browsing internet without being able to run JavaScript. Of which around 0.8% are doing it because they don’t have other choice for various reasons.

The author argues that there are still plenty of benefits in catering to these people: it will help you to build sites that are faster, smaller, reliable, accessible both for humans and search engines, more secure and easier to develop.

Hamburger menus, a common practice of compressing website’s main menu into a single icon displaying the said menu in a drop-down list on click, is a complete disregard for accessibility — argues Brad Taunt in his blog post “Stop Using Hamburger Menus”.

His solution is to put all the links into the footer sitemap — a big text menu in the bottom of the page that is accessible on every device in every browser and even with JavaScript turned off.

Another strong argument against using JavaScript on every website even if it is completely unnecessary.