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JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
(www.jonoalderson.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2025
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Programming
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Ðis is on point for almost everyþing, alþough ðere's a point to be made about compiling websites.
Static site generators let you, e.g. write content in a markup language, raðer ðan HTML. Ðis requires "compiling" the site, to which ðe auþor objects. Static sites, even when ðey use JavaScript, perform better, and I'd argue the compilation phase is a net benefit to boþ auþors and viewers.
HTML is a markup language, goddamnit! It's already simple when you aren't trying to do weird shit that it was never intended for!
(Edit: not mad at you specifically; mad at the widespread misconception.)
You're right, of course. HTML is a markup language. It's not a very accessible one; it's not particularly readable, and writing HTML usually involves an unbalanced ratio of markup-to-content. It's a markup language designed more for computers to read, than humans.
It's also an awful markup language. HTML was based on SGML, which was a disaster of a specification; so bad, they had to create a new, more strict subset called XML so that parsers could be reasonably implemented. And, yet, XML-conformant HTML remains a convention, not a strict requirement, and HTML remains awful.
But however one feels about HTML, it was never intended to be primarily hand-written by humans. Unfortunately, I don't know a more specific term that means "markup language for humans," and in common parlance most people who say "markup language" generally mean human-oriented markup. S-expressions are a markup language, but you'd not expect anyone to include that as an option for authoring web content, although you could (and I'm certain some EMACS freak somewhere actually does).
Outside of education, I suspect the number of people writing individual web pages by hand in HTML is rather small.
Uh, there's still a shitload of websites out there doing SSR using stuff like PHP, Rails, Blazor, etc. HTML is alive and well, and frankly it's much better than you claim.