Before "js everything", it wasn't just a plain simple pure web. It was flash and gifs and "dynamic html" that would break in half of the browsers, and you'd show a special version of your site saying "we're not paid enough to support your browser, go get another one".
Clients never were reasonnable in their demands, nor did most of the site owner have good and simple tastes and care about efficiency, nor did half of the internet care about user experience first above everything else.
Saying that the use of js has because heavy handed is cool and fun, but for any serious discussion there should be more acknowledgment of why we are in this situation in the first place. I'm not sure it's so much worse than 5 years before, at least we can read most things on mobile devices.
As a side point, I've done project on ultra weak platforms were every js had to be hand written to gain speed and memory space. I wouldn't try to do the same on some cookie cutter corporate site with a 600k slideshow loading on the front page, where having easily replacable components and tried and true pieces to test on the 20 combinations of browsers is far more critical that cutting 20k of compressed script.
I think this is very true. When Java launched I re-did the Sun home page as an applet. Bill Joy suggested that in the future HTML would be gone and each web page would be its own Java applet. He was mistaken of course :-) But as I've watched the emergence of 99% js pages I am reminded of his insight. His reasoning was pretty straight forward, the reason PDF (and that thing Imagen/Xerox did (DDF?)) existed was that to convey the document creator's intent to the consumer over a fungible media like computers, required that the document be a program describing what it looked like, leaving it up to the end node to interpret that program and then do its best to recreate it for the end user. That was something ASCII could never do. So with web pages, especially interactive ones, they were destined to be "programs" rather an some form of semantic markup structure.
I have come to appreciate that this is a pretty profound concept (well for me anyway :-), having the end result sent as generalized instructions for reconstruction, rather than as a external representation of the constructed object.
It's funny, the whole java applet thing was actually a better solution than JS in a lot of ways (shipping compiled/compressed bytecode with a security manager), just way, way ahead of it's time, and with a terrible windowing/drawing toolkit that meant it would never be adopted.
I think that in the mobile side it actually went the way you describe.
In japan docomo offered an open java platform (free to use, free to install, no gatekeeper for standard apps). Mobile html was only useable for dead simple things, there was no js of course, and any service with mildly complex things to do or show would be better to implement in it's own app. It sounds terrible, but the user experience wasn't that bad.
The terrible toolkit part was solved by Docomo shipping it's own UI toolkit (no J2ME compatibility, but it was so much more useable), and I think at some point there was a way to launch an app from the browser without installing it but I'm not sure my memory serves me well.
The choice of java was made for security of course, and I never heard of any serious breach in 10 years following the mobile tech news.
We get the same phenomenon I guess with the "go the mobile app" redirects on websites that don't want to have x optimized versions of the same service.
The first HTTP 1.1 implementation, CL-HTTP was written in ANSI Common Lisp.
> Clients never were reasonnable in their demands, nor did most of the site owner have good and simple tastes and care about efficiency, nor did half of the internet care about user experience first above everything else.
My web browser today uses more memory than my computer had in 1996. The web isn't efficient today at all.
Clients never were reasonnable in their demands, nor did most of the site owner have good and simple tastes and care about efficiency, nor did half of the internet care about user experience first above everything else.
Saying that the use of js has because heavy handed is cool and fun, but for any serious discussion there should be more acknowledgment of why we are in this situation in the first place. I'm not sure it's so much worse than 5 years before, at least we can read most things on mobile devices.
As a side point, I've done project on ultra weak platforms were every js had to be hand written to gain speed and memory space. I wouldn't try to do the same on some cookie cutter corporate site with a 600k slideshow loading on the front page, where having easily replacable components and tried and true pieces to test on the 20 combinations of browsers is far more critical that cutting 20k of compressed script.