Randolph Recently on some or other social network (probably the elephant as opposed to the butterfly), I engaged with someone about the PayPal Honey debacle. If you’re unaware, you can watch a video on the red site.
The conversation isn’t important. What’s important is that I miss the old web. I miss that it took three minutes to load a page on dial-up. I miss that I needed to install Flash to play a game. I miss that JavaScript hadn’t been invented yet. I know it’s the nostalgia talking, because broadband is awesome and Flash was a nightmare for security and reliability. I’ve read that as much as 80% of web traffic is now accessed through a mobile device, and yet….
I first went online in 1995. Back then, Internet Africa wasn’t owned by UUNET, and 28,800 bits per second were a pipe dream. If you wanted to find something, you had to know where to look. Surfing the web (we called it surfing because Mosaic was the only graphical web browser back then) required patience. If you wanted more prurient content, there was a guy called Justin. If you know, you know.
Most of our nascent digital history is gone. Eaten by Google, Amazon, you name it. It’s just not there anymore. Many of the sites I used to frequent back then aren’t even on the Internet Archive, because they predate the Internet Archive. I don’t even know what my first website looked like because there’s no reference material, and Git didn’t exist for a 19-year-old queer student.
This is a bit rambling, but the thing that’s really important is how fast computers are, but we’re wasting those resources using JavaScript everywhere. Those so-called full-stack developers have no idea how to write plain HTML. Even this stupid WordPress software I’ve been stuck with for almost 20 years has made my website bloated and slow.
In this recent Computerphile video, Matt Godbolt demonstrates how fast CPUs are in relation to the world around us, mapped onto human timelines. If you don’t know Matt, he’s my age and has achieved much more than I can ever dream, including Compiler Explorer. Even back in 1995, computers were sitting around (a very long time) waiting for the network to provide data. And it’s over this network that megabytes of JavaScript libraries are being downloaded, over and over again, to render a stupid pop-up menu, or serve ads you’re probably blocking anyway. Multiple megabytes of cruft that are mostly useless, clogging up the pipes that make the Internet what it is today, wasting the resources you paid good money for.
I miss the old web, where you downloaded plain HTML, and a browser rendered it locally. If there were images, those were downloaded as well, slowly filling up the page and moving text while you’re trying to read it. We take so much of the modern web for granted, and I guess it’s unappreciated what came before.
Look, I’m 48 now. I know I’m old. My day job is being a Grammar Nazi. I get to be a pedant and say “well, actually” for money. I know I’m biased. But I also want to go back to a time where visiting a website meant you would visit a website and read content, and not be bombarded with hustlers trying to sell you something.
I want you to appreciate that you can make a website really fast, and responsive, and beautiful, without JavaScript. Because without JavaScript, the web was a simpler, more secure place, and a CPU wasn’t waiting several years to display a banner ad, advertising an 83% discount on shit I didn’t ask for.
Turns out, this post became a No JavaScript screed. It wasn’t meant that way, but if the shoe fits….
(The featured image is a single-panel cartoon. The first person says “I have nothing to say”, and the second responds with “You should write a blog about it”.)