This is a wonderful piece by Bram. Half history lesson, and half practical advice for building resilient websites today:
By embracing what the web platform gives us — instead of trying to fight against it — we can build better websites.
Keep it simple. Apply the Rule of Least Power. Build with progressive enhancement in mind.
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — in that order.
The 1960s idea of “appropriate technology” feels like an early version of the principle of least power.
New technologies don’t have power; for that they’d need a community, documentation, and a thriving ecosystem of ancillary technology. What they have is potential, which resonates with the potential within the startup and the early adopter; perhaps they can all, over time, grow together.
This means startups don’t adopt new technologies despite their immaturity, they adopt them because of that immaturity. This drives a constant churn of novelty and obsolescence, which amplifies the importance of a technologist’s skillset, which drives startups to adopt new technologies.
This flywheel has been spinning for a long time, and won’t stop simply because I’ve pointed out that we’re conflating novelty with technological advancement. Hopefully we can slow it down, though, because I believe it’s causing real harm.
I understand less than half of this great talk by Meredith L. Patterson, but it ticks all my boxes: Leibniz, Turing, Borges, and Postel’s Law.
(via Tim Berners-Lee)
It’s not a matter of if your users don’t have JavaScript—it’s a matter of when and how often.
The answer to that is around 1% of the time.
If you had an application bug which occurred 1% of the time, you’d fix it. No team I’ve come across would put up with that level of reliability.
The same goes for JavaScript. It’s not about people who turn it off. It’s about the nature of the web itself.