This is an eco system that has taken code reuse to the (unreasonable) extreme.
When JS was becoming popular, I’m pretty sure every dev cocked an eyebrow at the dependency system and wondered how it’d be attacked.
Not even that actually. Actually the wheel is reinvented over and over again in this exact ecosystem. Many packages are low quality, and not even suitable to be reused much.
There's also the flavor of frontend developer that came from the backend and sneers at actually having to learn frontend because "it's not real development"
What kind of code does this developer write?
We once had the rule HTML should be purely semantic and all styling should be in CSS. It was brilliant, even though not everything looked as fancy as today.
https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/#client-side-script
Also, when was that semantic HTML rule? You make it sound like ancient history, but semantic HTML has only been a thing since HTML5 (2008).
If you're using HTML/CSS sensibly then it's accessible from the get-go by dint of the browser being accessible.
> Also, when was that semantic HTML rule? You make it sound like ancient history, but semantic HTML has only been a thing since HTML5 (2008).
HTML5 added a million new tags, but HTML4 had plenty of semantic tags that people regularly ignored and replaced with <div>, for example <p>, <em>, <blockquote>...
For ca. ten years, the advice was to pointlessly "replace <i> with <em> and <b> with <strong>" and it utterly screwed over most new web developers' understanding of semantic tags. There are many reasons to use italics (and they vary between languages) but "emphasis" is just one of them, and none of the others ever materialized as tags.
It would have been far better to have recommended <i class="emphasis"> and <i class="media-title"> and <i class="snarky-aside"> etc. than to have added the <em> tag and said "just use it instead of <i>".
That is straight up untrue. Some ARIA patterns require developers to implement focus management and keyboard access from scratch.
For example, ”Correct implementation of the tree role requires implementation of complex functionality that is not needed for typical site navigation that is styled to look like a tree with expandable sections.”
But sometimes you do need that kind of widget for something else.
Or are you talking about a situation where the developer has implemented a custom component (aka "done something") which doesn't use the native focus system and therefore requires additional work to make accessible?
The native focus system typically works just fine, but JS is needed for keyboard interactions and to set things like aria-activedescendant.
I'm not saying the ideal frontend dev writes no JS. I'm saying they write as little as possible. Some times you need JS, nothing wrong with that. The vast majority of the time you don't. And if you do I'd say it's a self-imposed requirement (or a direct/indirect result of a self imposed requirement) most of the time.
For me as a mostly backend dev, this was actually quite easy to achieve. Tiny modification of the backend API, some work in the frontend using JS to remove hints that should not show when JS is running, and voila, it works. Of course my pages are very simple in nature, but the same principles can be applied to larger pages. One could even link/direct to different pages, depending on the user running JS or not, and then have a workflow without JS and one with JS. It is all possible and only a matter of wanting to make an effort. Of course, modern JS frameworks do not really encourage this kind of design. Though server side rendering becomes more popular these days, I don't think we are quite there yet.
A page that is blank when not running JS has exactly zero accessibility.
The customer “ooh”s and “aah”s at said fancy animations running on the salesman’s top of the line macbook pro and is lured in, only realising too late that they’ve been bitten in the ass by the enormous amount of bloat that makes it run like a potato on any computer that costs less than four thousand dollars.
And US/EU laws are written by clueless bureaucrats whose most recent experience with technology is not even an electric typewriter.
What’s your point?
We "in the know" might agree, but we're not going to get it sold.
The designer, in my experience, is totally fine with just using a normal select element, they don't demand that I reinvent the drop-down with divs just to put rounded corners on the options.
Nobody cares about that stuff. These are minor details, we can change it later if someone really wants it. As long as we're not just sitting on our hands for lack of work I'm not putting effort into reinventing things the browser has already solved.
But the middle management might actually praise the developer, because they "get the job done" with the minimal effort (so "efficient"!).
Let me assure you, devs were skeptical about all this well before AI.
A lot of the culture is built by certain people who make a living out of package maximalism.
More packages == more eyballs == more donations.
They have an agenda that small packages are good and made PRs into popular packages to inject their junk into the supply chain.
Yes, I remember thinking at the time "how are people not ashamed to install this?"
NPM is good for building your own stack but it's a bad idea (usually) to download the Internet. No dep system is 100% safe (including AI, generating new security vulns yay).
I'd like to think that we'll all stop grabbing code we don't understand and thrusting it into places we don't belong, or at least, do it more slowly, however, I also don't have much faith in the average (especially frontend web) dev. They are often the same idiots doing XYZ in the street.
I predict more hilarious (scary even) kerfuffles, probably even major militaries losing control of things ala Terminator style.
In fact, when we did have Java in the browser it was loaded with security issues primarily because of the much greater complexity of the Java language.
The issue here is not Java or it's complexity. The point is also not Java, it's incidental that it was popular at the time. It's people acting irrationally about things and jumping ship for an even-worse system.
Like, yes, if that really were the whole attack surface of JS, sure nobody would care. They also wouldn't use it...and nothing we cared about would use it either...
Anyways, I think you are missing the forest for the trees if you think this is a Java vs JavaScript comparison, don't worry it's also possible to produce junk enterprise code too...
Just amusing watching people be irrationally scared of one language/ecosystem vs another without stopping to think why or where the problems are coming from.
But the reason Java is more secure than JavaScript in the context of supply chain attacks is fourfold:
1. Maven packages don't have install scripts. "Installing" a package from a Maven repository just means downloading it to a local cache, and that's it.
2. Java code is loaded lazily on demand, class at a time. Even adding classes to a JAR doesn't guarantee they'll run.
3. Java uses fewer, larger, more curated libraries in which upgrades are a more manual affair involving reading the release notes and the like. This does have its downsides: apps can ship with old libraries that have unfixed bugs. Corporate users tend to have scanners looking for such problems. But it also has an upside, in that pushing bad code doesn't immediately affect anything and there's plenty of time for the author to notice.
4. Corporate Java users often run internal mirrors of Maven rather than having every developer fetch from upstream.
The gap isn't huge: Java frameworks sometimes come with build system plugins that could inject malware as they compile the code, and of course if you can modify a JAR you can always inject code into a class that's very likely to be used on any reasonable codepath.
But for all the ragging people like to do on Java security, it was ahead of its time. A reasonable fix for these kind of supply chain attacks looks a lot like the SecurityManager! The SecurityManager didn't get enough adoption to justify its maintenance costs and was removed, partly because of those factors above that mean supply chain attacks haven't had a significant impact on the JVM ecosystem yet, and partly due to its complexity.
It's not clear yet what securing the supply chain in the Java world will look like. In-process sandboxing might come back or it might be better to adopt a Chrome-style microservice architecture; GraalVM has got a coarser-grained form of sandboxing that supports both in-process and out-of-process isolation already. I wrote about the tradeoffs involved in different approaches here:
https://blog.plan99.net/why-not-capability-languages-a8e6cbd...
[1] https://medium.com/graalvm/writing-truly-memory-safe-jit-com...