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Comment by quadrangle | Hacker News Reader

Stupid site is totally broken with NoScript even though all that matters in it is plain text.

Anyway, there's something to do this sentiment, but people often are actually more productive when collaborating than when reinventing the wheel over and over. And splitting up attention between a bunch of projects isn't healthy in and of itself. It's just that it's also true that competition has many benefits. But it's complicated.

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The site is powered entirely by MeteorJS. There's a no-script version generated by Phantom but I guess it's not made for viewing. Sorry about that.

There was a brief period a few years ago when the leading web design trend was to make pages simple, fast, and accessible. Out the window those all went.

Reminds me of how Flash sites looked when Flash Player was not installed (or with a flash blocker installed). We made a 360 on needless Web design apparently :-)

Nine times out of 10 when I mention degradability I am met with eyerolls or out-and-out chuckles.

But seriously, is there any reasonable advantage to putting a JS layer between the user and the HTML/CSS?

Yes. It makes for a much more fluid experience (at least if you have JS ;)), similar to that of a desktop app. The web was originally built to be a set of individual pages but that's not how we want things to behave today. Building a UI with Meteor.com where the JS controls all the interaction, page switching, event handling and automatic data updates is sooo much simpler than requiring a full page refresh or using AJAX to modify individual components. If the DOM is built up by JS in the first place, it makes it very simple to change it by JS. Read more about Meteor's philosophy in the first paragraphs of their docs, here: http://docs.meteor.com/

The downside is that if you don't have JS, you can't do much. In our case it was a price we decided to pay.

Interesting. What sort of backend do you use? Is it homegrown or can you integrate with e.g. Wordpress?

Meteor.com is using NodeJS as a backend, but the idea is to not separate these two components. So Meteor spans both and you can write stuff designated for the client and the server side in the same file. In practice we rarely do, but both sides run the same code. Check it out!

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