A button to toggle is good design, but it should just default to your system preferences.

Took me ages to find a snippet that has a manual dark mode toggle but in a way that works with prefer-color-scheme so by default it inherits your settings but you can overwrite it... It's just not a priority for a lot of people or they're ok with the site flashing or something.

Bookmarking this, so far I've cobbled my Dark/Light Mode switch together with Material-UI themes, but this seems like the cleaner way to do this that I've been searching for!

I hate "dark mode" so much

Don't default to it as it makes the page hard to read and ugly. If you want make it optional that is fine but don't force it.

The thing with this is that many people want to switch their setting to be non default, and it's impossible to have both user configurable and nice css at the same time. One has to go.

Edit: Oops, just realized I replied to a 2 month old comment. My bad

Not all frameworks are bad

The problem is the devs/owners not understanding basic fundamentals. They could see a major financial benefit if they make the page snappy and light but apparently no one at these companies realizes that.

PE from server rendering only to a full interactive SPA in the browser is really not trivial both for frameworks and app devs

there are a handful of frameworks that support it fairly ergonomically now but it's a discipline that takes time and effort

also disabling javascript is a tiny minority use case

I did mine in plain old HTML. No JavaScript.

requiring JS makes sense on some sites, namely those that act more like web apps that let you do stuff (like WhatsApp

I mean yes, but Whatsapp is a bad example. It could easily use no JavaScript. In the end it's the same as Lemmy or any other forum. You could post a message, get a new page with the message. Switching chats is loading a new page. Of course JavaScript enhances the experience, makes it more fluid, etc, but messengers could work perfectly fine without JavaScript.

You want to see terrible try looking at the network tab in inspect element

"Modern" pages load hundreds of large assets instead of keeping it smaller and clean.

its also cdn on cdn nobody does local libraries anymore

It's encouraged to use things with a supply chain easily poisoned.

There's the issue of a Heisenberg effect here - when a spectator is present, like a huge audit of something, nothing happens, and when a spectator isn't present, there's nobody to look every day in piles of constantly changed crap to detect if something happens.

Also not even easily poisoned, but easily denied. It's about control. The militaries and producers of complex industrial equipment were the first to start doing this, however nuts that may seem. It's useful to sell your allies a system they can use, but only when allowed. Or sell industrial equipment that can't be smuggled to a third country without your permission.

These things - they are legal even morally, but at some point in discussion of them common good might arise as a thing in itself, separate from morality. For the common good such systems of control are clear poison.

This has to be fixed though. I don't know, how, but it's an economic situation bringing enormous damage every moment.

And most of people it affects are, like me, in countries where real political activism is impossible.

This is the next thing that should be somehow resolved like child labor, 8-hour workdays, women's voting rights and lead paint. Interoperability and non-adversarial standards of the global network.

this is the way

Graceful degradation is for people that are angry about the future. Progressive enhancement is for people that respect the past. And it’s stupid to not hire someone only because they don’t know a term that you know.

React tutorial are like that. You create a simple HTML page with a script and the script generates everything.

I had to do a simple webpage for an embedded webserver and the provider of the library recommended preact, the lightweight version of react. Having no webdev experience, I used preact as recommended and it is a nightmare to use and debug.

People do stuff in JavaScript that you really don't need JavaScript for. You don't need JS to display a store listing, for instance. Or a news page, or documentation, or even a search engine

Yeah, it's not a hard concept, it is an impossible concept.

As a web dev, I'll say that yes, it is achievable. The problem isn't what's possible, but that we've trained new frontend devs in certain ways and given them certain tools. Those tools are being used in places they shouldn't, and those same new frontend devs are failing to learn the fundamentals of HTTP and HTML.

React, for example, is a JavaScript framework that's become incredibly popular in recent years. It's meant for "single page applications". I once made a control panel for a vacuum former with it, where you could turn on zones of heating and get the temperature updated in real time. You're not expected to navigate away from that page while you're using it. I think this is a good place to use React, though you could make the argument that it should be a native GUI app. (I'll say that it isn't that important; this thing runs fine on a Raspberry Pi 3, which is the target platform).

React is not a good option for an ecommerce site. You want to click on a product to check out its details. That means you're going between very different views (pages) a lot. React increases complexity with no clear gain. An argument can be made for the address/payment/finalization steps. The money people like that because there's a strong correlation between streamlining checkout and how often cash ends up in their hands.

A lot of those sites use React, anyway, for everything. Why? Because we've trained a bunch of new frontend devs so much on it that they have no idea how to make a site without React. This overspecialization has been detrimental.

Not OP, But welcome to my TED talk.

Supporting disabled JavaScript is a pretty significant need for accessibility features. None of the text browsers supported JavaScript until 2017, and there's still a lot of old tech out there that doesn't deal well with it.

It wasn't until the rise of react and angular that this became a big deal. But, It's extremely common now to send most of the website as code. And even scrapers now support JavaScript.

There's no "minor point" clause on the term graceful degredation. At the same time, there's no minimum requirement. Would it be good to be thorough and provide a static page? I'd say yes but it's not like anyone is going to do that anymore.

The tables have turned, You can no longer live without JavaScript and now you need browsers that lie about your screen resolution, agent and your plugins because mega corps can sniff who you are by the slightest whiff of your configs.

And that's NOT pretty cool

personally I think this is mostly due to for some reason people tend to give up on visiting a website if it takes more than a second or two to load(guilty as charged though), so instead they load a mostly blank page (which gives the sign that its loading) and then use javascript to load the rest of the content in.

that and fucking ads galore

a lot doesn't work on piefed but thankfully replying does (just tested it)

It's impressive that for a technology that's supposed to be better than Mastodon (bloated) or Reddit (ass-corporate), Lemmy still relies on the same basic evils.

It depends. Inertia.js can pre-render pages server side, so you don't need JavaScript to see the content.

Problem is so many websites are slow for no good reason.

And JS is being used to steal our info and push aggressive advertisment.

Which part is unknown to you?

The matter is not javascript per se but the use companies and new developers do, if everyone used like you there would probably be no problem. A gazillion dependencies and zero optimization, eating up cpu, spying on us, advertisements...

And if you try and use an alternative browser you know many websites won't work.

JavaScript is directly related to almost everything that makes browser tabs take up more RAM than a typical PC in 1998. There are ways to use it in targeted ways that improve responsiveness (objectively or subjectively). The web as it stands is so far beyond that justification that it's almost laughable to even bring it up.

I run a personal blog with zero JavaScript; just HTML, CSS, and some pictures. Firefox's memory snapshot says it uses <3MB on the homepage. Amazon's homepage is currently giving me 38MB, and this comment section with the Alexandrite frontend is giving me 30MB. Those two may even be at the low end of what's out there.

I would word it as: I should not have to allow strangers to execute arbitrary code on my PC just so I can view some text and/or images.

Low-key I'm disagreeing

Because big tech has ruined the internet and uses JavaScript among other things, to track you. Some people blame the plastic pollution on improper recycling when we know that’s exactly what the evil plastic industry wants us to do: blame the consumer. Similarly, people think it’s their responsibility to turn off JavaScript when they should be blaming big tech. Even if you get rid of JavaScript, they will just find other creating ways to track you (source). We have to fix the structures running the tech industry.

This is correct. Web dev is told to make sure ads load before content. They don't want users that don't generate profits.