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Comment by worble | Hacker News Reader

> As a result every single page/app has to carry around the whole world just to be barely useable.

So pages before this javascript bloat became commonly accepted were unusable? Maybe at some point web developers have to accept that the web was simply not built for the things they're trying to do with it, and that comes with a cost. Maybe they should evaluating whether they _really_ need animations on everything, whether everything _has_ to be a SPA made in [current popular framework]. I'm not even saying these things are bad, they absolutely do have value, but that value has a tradeoff, and usually that tradeoff is placed on your customers.

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> Maybe at some point web developers have to accept that the web was simply not built for the things they're trying to do with it, and that comes with a cost.

So what's your proposal? To have one browser for "web documents" and another just for those things built by web developers that you dismiss with straw men, yet still acknowledge as having value?

If they have value, but they incur a cost, shouldn't we be looking at why we have that cost and how to drive it down? That's exactly what the post you're replying to is trying to convey.

Yes, not everything has to be animated or an SPA, because some things are good enough as just simple "web documents". But others gain in usefulness, usability and cognition by being augmented (e.g. data visualisation, business apps, games, et al). Not every web content is created for the same purpose. We still end up with the same crippled DOM/JavaScript combo. That should be the focus of the conversation.

The parent’s point is that, if all these things were browser JS runtime features, there’d be no tradeoff to be made. They’d be “free.”

If every JS page in the world today includes the same line of code, isn’t it obviously the fault of browser makers for not making that line of code part of the JS prelude and thereby making it “free”?

That's fine, and if they do end up being part of the JS runtime, then great! But right now they don't, so by including those you are actively having to pay the cost of doing so. My point of contention with the parent post is that these features are requirements for a webpage "to be barely useable". You can absolutely make great websites and webpages without these.

That’s a slippery slope. We’ll eventually turn the browser into an OS.

And more features = more surface area for bugs.

It's increasingly looking like our two options are either

1. Turning the browser into an OS (what Google is working toward)

2. Downloading an OS on each page load (What webassembly is working toward)

An OS? An exaggeration maybe, but only slight. The browser is pretty much its own environment already. It's been the case for decades. It can display text, process a variety of media, and run programs (written in JavaScript). The main cause of frustration at this point is that, compared to other popular programmable environments (C, PHP, Python, node.js, etc), where some real focus is put into evolving the language along with a variety of primary development tools, people in charge of the browser's ecosystem seem to still be coming to terms with the programmable part of its identity.

All the dilly-dallying results in community efforts that pile on top of each other to create all this bloat that is carried from one tool to the next framework.

We really do need animations on everything, SPAs, etc. Having a less pretty looking site makes us appear much less trustworthy to non-technical customers, who don't care that their browser was not originally created for our online storefront. I imagine that's the same for pretty much every other e-commerce site.

> So pages before this javascript bloat became commonly accepted were unusable?

They weren't unusable. They, too, were barely useable in any scenario outside of a static HTML page with static images. There's a reason why jQuery was (and probably still is) the most popular Javascript library. You don't have to go too far to see what people were doing before "js bloat", just look at ExtJS [1]. They would have loved to have the "js bloat" 10 years ago.

[1] https://www.sencha.com/products/extjs/

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