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Comment by lomnakkus | Hacker News Reader

While that would probably work fine for display and layout, but it doesn't work so well with the semantic document model that the web is built on. For example accessibility would suffer greatly unless every "jquery" (using your analogy) out there were to implement its own accessibility. (That's not to say things are absolutely peachy wrt. accessibility these days, but they'd get a lot worse if everybody had to implement their own.)

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I don't know if developers even care about semantic markup anymore, just have your 5 meg of JavaScript squirt out a bundle of divs and to hell with accessibility.

Just render a png file, server side. The only way to ensure pixel perfect layout, and it's even going to use less bandwidth than most JS frameworks these days.

Wrap that sucker in some HTML with <map> tags and you're golden.

Can't name any site that uses <map> still other than http://www.teamfortress.com

> Just render a png file, server side.

Know of any examples of that in practice or is this just a joke?

This is a joke, albeit with many web pages I get the suspicion that they'd indeed be better off serving a PNG or PDF file instead. Not to mention that PNG renders much, much faster than javascript orgies.

I got tired of this exact thing, so I started making an informational site:

http://www.lightentheweb.com/

It's very very not ready yet, but I'd appreciate some pointers or PRs.

You could add http://vanilla-js.com/ ? :D

Haha, that's too light, I think :) I'm planning on having articles on how to do things that you're currently using libraries for with vanilla JS, though.

I think there's a distinction to be made between "web pages" and "web apps". Web pages like news articles and blog posts fit well in the semantic document model of HTML. Web apps extend past this model -- something like DPS would make more sense for them.

I think the lack of such a clear distinction is part of the web's success. For example, is Facebook a web page or a web app?

>For example, is Facebook a web page or a web app?

Is this a trick question? :) On the scale from pages to apps, where one end is someone's static geocities page about their cats and the other end is, let's say, github: Facebook is definitely an app.

It's kind of a trick question in that my point is that it is a more of a scale than a binary opposition, and that the ability to mix document-like parts with program-like parts is what made the web so incredibly successful.

Well clearly, Facebook "pages" are web pages. They have it in the name, they have static URLs, their own content.

And other parts of Facebook, like the chat, are hard to describe as a page.

That model died when JavaScript got added and Web 2.0 was born.

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