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Comment by davidgerard | Hacker News Reader

Because there is no trivially replaceable substitute for JavaScript in the site construction, as there is for the browser.

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Last time I used OkCupid, I can't remember anything that would actually require JS to work. Real time updates (for instance, in IM) wouldn't be possible, but exchanging messages, looking at profiles and answering quiz questions is perfectly doable without JS.

(I know I always sound like someone who hates JavaScript, but at least for the stuff OkC had two years ago, it's not really crucial. IIRC, you could browse user profiles with JS off, but IM didn't work with JS off.)

> Real time updates (for instance, in IM) wouldn't be possible

If we're going back in time, you can get this via Flash.

Flash uses ActionScript, which is an implementation of ECMAScript, which was designed by Brandan Eich. ECMAScript is a standardization of Javascript.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript

The IM case can be done without JS, actually, using chunked encoding [1]. This is similar to the MIME multipart/x-mixed-replace technique [2] that was used for "streaming" webcams in the late 90s.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunked_transfer_encoding [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME#Mixed-Replace

So you're saying that even someone who once made a morally wrong decision can still be competent enough to produce a technology that could serve to become a foundational component to the web as we know it?

Have you ever seen anyone suggesting anything remotely contrary, or are you just setting up the mother of all strawmen?

Heh. Just the other day at work I joked that people might get so upset at this that they organize and deploy a better JavaScript substitute for every possible use case.

One can hope ...

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