On not choosing WordPress for the W3C redesign project - Working in the open with W3C and Studio 24

Progressive Enhancement—Ain’t Nobody Got Time for that | GlückPress

Two sides of a debate on progressive enhancement…

Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko wrote Progressive enhancement — JS sites that work:

If your content website breaks down from JavaScript issue — it is broken.

Joe Hoyle disagrees:

Unlike Rarst, I don’t value progressive enhancement very highly and don’t agree it’s a fundamental principle of the web that should be universally employed. Quite frankly, I don’t care about not supporting JavaScript, and neither does virtually anyone else. It’s not that it doesn’t have any value, or utility - but in a world where we don’t have unlimited resources and time, one has to prioritise what we’ll support and not support.

Caspar acknowledges this:

I don’t have any problem buying into pragmatism as the main and often pressing reason for not investing into a no-JS fallback. The idealistic nature of a design directive like progressive enhancement is very clear to me, and so are typical restrictions in client projects (budgets, deadlines, processes of decision making).

But concludes that by itself that’s not enough reason to ditch such a fundamental technique for building a universal, accessible web:

Ain’t nobody got time for progressive enhancement always, maybe. But entirely ditching principle as a compass for resilient decision making won’t do.

See also: Mike Little’s thoughts on progressive enhancement and accessibility.

JS-heavy approaches are not compatible with long-term performance goals

Frameworks like React are often perceived as accelerators, or even as the only sensible way to do web development. There’s this notion that a more “modern” stack (read: JS-heavy, where the JS ends up running on the user’s browser) allows you to be more agile, release more often with fewer bugs, make code more maintainable, and ultimately launch better sites. In short, the claim is that this approach will offer huge improvements to developer experience, and that these DevEx benefits will trickle down to the user.

But over the years, this narrative has proven to be unrealistic, at best. In reality, for any decently sized JS-heavy project, you should expect that what you build will be slower than advertised, it will keep getting slower over time while it sees ongoing work, and it will take more effort to develop and especially to maintain than what you were led to believe, with as many bugs as any other approach.

Where it comes to performance, the important thing to note is that a JS-heavy approach (and particularly one based on React & friends) will most likely not be a good starting point; in fact, it will probably prove to be a performance minefield that you will need to keep revisiting, risking a detonation with every new commit.

The Incredible Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button

Well, this is horrifying.

JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress) - Jono Alderson

Semantic HTML? Optional. Server-side rendering? Rebuilt from scratch. Accessibility? Maybe, if there’s time. Performance? Who cares, when you can save costs by putting loading burdens onto the user’s device, instead of your server?

So gradually, the web became something you had to compile before you could publish. Not because users needed it. But because developers wanted it to feel modern.

Everything’s optimised for developers – and hostile to everyone else.

This isn’t accidental. It’s cultural. We’ve created an industry where complexity is celebrated. Where cleverness is rewarded. Where engineering sophistication is valued more than clarity, usability, or commercial effectiveness.

Why Silicon Valley CTOs Are Secretly Moving Away from React | by Coders Stop | in JavaScript in Plain English - Freedium

“We’ve stripped React out of our highest-traffic user flows and replaced it with vanilla JavaScript using small, focused libraries for specific needs,” said the CTO of a streaming service. “Our page load times dropped by 60% and our conversion rates improved by 14%.”