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I'm amazed at how often this is a controversial opinion, but… your site or app should work as much as possible without JavaScript. The most common argument I hear against this is that in 2024, JavaScript is integral part of the front end stack and almost no one disables it. And they're right! And yet, JavaScript fails to load all the time. CDNs go down. Downloads timeout on slow internet connections. Overly aggressive firewalls and ad blockers block valid JavaScript files from loading. Even when JavaScript does load successfully, there's a whole bunch of time between the HTML loads and the JS actually executes. JavaScript is sloooow. Zach Leatherman ran an experiment a few years ago and found that an 8.5 MB HTML file with every tweet he'd ever written rendered faster than a React version loading just a single tweet into the UI. Not everything can work without JavaScript. Photoshop in the browser? That needs JS. But the reality is, most of what we build is either static HTML or mostly just forms and page reloads. We can build the web that way by default, and progressively enhance a more Ajaxy experience on top of it. The result is an app that's faster to load, faster to run, and less prone to breaking… without much additional work for your developers. (I'll get into the details of that in a future article.) If you're building a site or app that you make money from, you should care deeply about this. Slow, broken sites make less money. Delays of as little as 100ms can reduce sales, reduce traffic, and cost companies millions. The web is more capable than ever, yet the sites and apps we use feel more slow and fragile than ever. If you'd like help building sites that are fast, resilient, and easier to maintain, get in touch. I've worked with clients like NASA and Harvard Business School to help them do just that. I'd love to work with you, too. Cheers, Want to share this with others or read it later? View it in a browser. |