Monday, December 17, 2007

Why is Javascript almost Mandatory?

My Comment on Groklaw

I just posted this on Groklaw in response to PJ, asking why Javascript was necessary for the Web. These are my thoughts on the matter, not right, not wrong but mine.

Javascript might not be mandatory in some parts of the
internet, but it allows web-pages to leap out of the bad gui design of the
previous generation.
Web-sites characterised by page after page of detailed
content, which are are not changed from refresh to refresh cause the users to be
turned off. The guts of an easy to use site is a FAST responsive interface,
which can be easily done with Javascript (although not impossible to do with
other tools, and easy for Flash and other rich clients). There is a reason that
the early internet had such dismal 'stickyness', the reason is that the content
had to be sooooo much more attractive to keep the audience without a good
interface. Site owners might be able to mitigate responsiveness issues with
Hardware/Software/Bandwidth/Content Delivery Network but cannot fix them without
active code being run on the client.
NOTE: Geeklog(and blogs generally) allows
you and the reader to optimise pages into very large 'chunks' of comments, the
only disconnect comes when we feel the need to comment, we lose context of our
comment when posting.
NOTE2: Sucessful sites almost universally have trivial to
use GUI's with very little overhead, that is not an accident.