At one time there was; it was called the Internet. The archive still exists, but it's been made harder to browse through due to being jumbled up with javascript and cat gifs.
False choice, isn't it? I mean, the complaint isn't that the public now has sites with massive javascript and related technologies. The complaint is that it has muscled out useful sites that did not use those technologies. And it should be heavily noted that the heavy muscles that have pushed out many of these sites is not necessarily "the public."
Kind of funny to say that on a text-only JS-free site that seems to be alive and well, linking to an article on an old-school mailing list archive site. :)
Oh, certainly. I just can resonate with the sentiment that these sites aren't the majority.
Even this site, honestly, is less than easy to deal with on a recurring basis. (Consider, hard to remember which was the top story three days ago at noon.) Specifically, sometimes I lose a story because I refresh and something plummeted off the page. Hard to have any idea how far to "scroll back" to see it.
It's also an astute observation that is incredibly true! Most sites now incorporate JavaScript.
I remember when it was "new-fangled" (and DHTML anyone?) and everyone put those annoying cursor trackers that trailed blobs from where your cursor was.
What I mainly remember is two things: suddenly everyone had to do client-side form checking to prevent people from typing dashes in a phone number field, and everyone tried to imitate Java without actually using Java. It seems like any way you could enhance a page by combining mouseover events, gifs and loading content dynamically you would throw into a page, even if it made the user experience a total mess. Which of course never happens today.
My favorite memory is helping to write some of the first "griefers" using JS. If you were unlucky enough to stumble onto our page you had a window literally jumping around your screen with pop-ups til the end of time. There was no way to exit the browser until you'd clicked it all and it'd never end. Just getting your mouse near the 'X' would make the window jump around again. Of course, that was a mild annoyance compared to loading fonts and images so big they'd consume all the available RAM and make the machine fall over from swapping in about 15 seconds.
I have those memories too, on Windows 95 or 98? I remember IE4 being released and it could do a lot more than IE3, plus it was more "forgiving" with sloppy HTML compared to Netscape.
