JavaScript’s Dark Side
huffduffer.com
huffduffer.com
Now, the talk is more sensible and balanced. I wouldn't say it's brilliant or brings much new ideas on the table, it's really about describing different points of view and different approaches to graceful degradation.
My main grief would be to have an audio feed of a presentation commenting live site and tools demos. Obviously video would be appropriate.
I think you were looking for the word pedantic, not good. It's as stupid an idea as semantic html. Thank god that one's dying off before html5 really takes hold, that could have been a right mess.
You are sitting back being the past and calling it progress, while scorning others for trying to find the future.
We built http://m.lanyrd.com using progressive enhancement, it didn't hold us back, quite the opposite, we were able to support devices old and new. In fact, for older devices, we use a few tricks to stop them parsing most js, keeping the performance snappy. Newer devices get offline capabilities. Yet an old devices can copy and paste a deep link to their friend with a newer device, the urls are the same and meaningful.
In terms of maintenance, I know my content's in the html, my design is in the css, and my behaviour's in the JS. Calls to the JS that do per-page enhancing are made at the bottom of each html page, so it's easy for developers to follow the path of execution. It's explicit rather than implicit.
I'm not saying all sites should work without JS, for instance, http://www.spritecow.com depends on it, but content driven sites should avoid JS dependancy. Ever followed a link to a tweet? Eg https://twitter.com/stopsatgreen/status/181686984371208192, a redirect to a meaningless url, 40+ http requests & over 950k to display a 140 char tweet? I wouldn't call that progress.
Twitter could be showing me the content within 100k of data, and that's giving them room for a massive css file. Instead I'm waiting for 500k of JS before I get anything.
Progressive enhancement is not difficult. Just build your site as if there was no Javascript and then add the JS bits. Easy. With all the js libraries about it's even easier these days, use something like yepnope.js and it'll even allow you to load scripts based on what capabilities the browser supports. Progressive enhancements becomes difficult when it's an after thought, maybe when you going into testing and suddenly realise the developer hasn't completely read the specs!
I totally understand for some sites it is completely necessary, but for sites like Twitter and Facebook it should not be necessary. Sure the JS adds a gloss and finish to make the user experience slicker, but there is nothing on there which could not be achieved with plain old html and css...
Also, for some of us we still have to support sites with JS turned off and even (unfortunately) support IE6! It's the requirement of the client and although most likely none of their customers will have JS turned off or run IE6, the corporate big wigs in head office will need to give final approval!