i absolutely hate how the modern web just fails to load if one has javascript turned off. i, as a user, should be able to switch off javascript and have the site work exactly as it does with javascript turned on. it’s not a hard concept, people.
but you ask candidates to explain “graceful degradation” and they’ll sit and look at you with a blank stare.
How would a page fetch new messages for you without JS?
You don’t. That’s the gracefull degradation part. You can still read your chat history and send new messages, but receiving messages as they come requires page reload or enabling js.
my only issue with this ideology(the require page load) is, this setup would essentially require a whole new processing system to handle, as instead of it being sent via events, it would need to be rendered and sent server side. This also forces the server to load everything at once instead of dynamically like how it currently does, which will increase strain/load on the server node that is displaying the web page, while also removing the potential of service isolation between the parts of the web page meaning if one component goes down(such as chat history), the entire page handler goes down, while also decreasing page response and load times. That’s the downside of those old legacy style pages. They are a pain in the ass to maintain, run slower and don’t have much fallover ability.
It’s basically asking the provider to spend more to: make the service slower, remove features from the site (both information and functionality wise) and have a more complex setup when scaling, to increase compatibility for a minor portion of the current machines and users out there.
this is of course also ignoring the increase request load as you are now having to resend entire webpages to get data instead of just messages/updates too.
The web interface can already be reloaded at any time and has to do all of this. You seem to be missing we’re talking about degradation here, remember the definition of the word, it means it isn’t as good as when JS is enabled. The point is it should still work somehow.
Just to make sure we are on the same page then, cause I don’t see the issue with my post.
I am using the term “Graceful Degradation” which is meant as a fault tolerance for tech stacks to allow for a critical component to be removed.
This critical component people are talking about is Javascript which is used for all dynamically loaded content, and used for fallover protection so one service going down doesn’t make it so the entire page goes down (also an example of fault tolerance).
The proposed solution given would remove that fault tolerance for the reasons I provided in the original reply, while degrading the users experience due to increased page load time (users reloading the page inconsistently vs consistently to get new information) and increasing maintenance costs and overhead on the provider.
Additionally, the new processing system that you mentioned already exists generally doesn’t, because they(websites) mostly use a dynamic load style nowadays, not a static(as in the client doesn’t change it) page, which is what this type of system would require.
note: edits were for phrasing, and a typo