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Comment by ng12 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's so weird that many people on HN can't fathom a website being more complex than Medium. I've spent the last 5+ years doing nothing but develop data-heavy visualization apps. The alternative is not building a website without JS, it's building a desktop application using Swing or QT.

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> I've spent the last 5+ years doing nothing but develop data-heavy visualization apps.

Those aren't what this article is talking about though, For a huge client facing desktop web app, you can load things up front, expect the user to wait a bit, and then off you go.

But imagine if every page on HN took ~15 seconds to load. Heck the reddit mobile experience right now is that the comments section takes 4-5 seconds to load, and sometimes it doesn't load at all. Of course it is instant in their mobile app, and also instantaneous in their legacy mobile view. (Which makes me seriously question what in the world the modern mobile site is doing.)

Most content is temporary and short lived. Caching a script does next to no good if I only ever visit a site once or twice a month, I'd prefer there not be a script at all!

In regards to content, HN is one of the most valuable sites I use. The JavaScript is so tiny as to be inconsequential.

Give me a CNN.com that is as responsive.

I know your request is tongue-in-cheek, but here you go:

http://lite.cnn.io/en

an old fashion img tag at top and I'd be delighted.

Need to resize the browser window to get a good column width, but that site is fast.

(pure black on pure white also isn't easy on the eyes, but plain ol HTML can change that as well! :) )

The problem is that most of the "bad" JS violators aren't building data viz, they're doing something much less complicated with the same tools.

Edit: the article mentions CNN, which is a mostly "static" site, but has enough JS to take 13 seconds to load on the "average" phone.

The counter-problem is that the "solution" that is peddled is to have pages that run perfectly with JS disabled rather than advocating for better usage.

Which is a pleasure, because I can go all the way down to OS APIs if needed and don't have to bother with browser rendering engine quirks and differences in how they understand the whole Web stack, sometimes even on the same browser just different versions.

The only way to achieve something similar on the Web is to stick with canvas and WebGL.

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