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.

  • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.caEnglish
    31·
    12 hours ago

    I also feel like everyone seems to be missing that we’re taking about degradation, which isn’t usually “no js at all”, it’s some subset that isn’t supported. People use feature detection to find out of some feature is supported in the browser and if it’s not the they don’t enable the feature the depends on it.

    For the chat example, you could argue that a chat can degrade into a bulletin board, but I’d argue that people use chat for realtime messaging so js is needed for the base use case.

    If your webpage primarily just displays static information, then I agree that it should work without js or css. Like Wikipedia, or a blog, or news, or a product marketing page, or a forum/BBS.
    But there is a huge part of the web that this simply doesn’t apply to, and it’s not realistic to have them put in huge effort to support what can only be a broken experience for a fraction of a percent of users.