You’re correct, and I’m going to explain how this happens. I’m not justifying that it happens, just explaining it.

It isn’t that no one knows what graceful degradation is anymore. It’s that they don’t try to serve every browser that’s existed since the beginning of time.

When you develop software, you have to make some choices about what clients you’re going to support, because you then need to test for all those clients to ensure you haven’t broken their experience.

With ever-increasing demands for more and more software delivery to drive ever greater business results, developers want to serve as few clients as possible. And they know exactly what clients their audience use - this is easy to see and log.

This leads to conversations like: can we drop browser version X? It represents 0.4% of our audience but takes the same 10% of our testing effort as the top browser.”

And of course the business heads making the demands on their time say yes, because they don’t want to slow down new projects by 10% over 0.4% of TAM. The developers are happy because it’s less work for them and fewer bizarre bugs to deal with from antiquated software.

Not one person in this picture will fight for your right to turn off JavaScript just because you have some philosophy against it. It’s really no longer the “scripting language for animations and interactivity” on top of HTML like it used to be. It’s the entire application now. 🤷‍♂️

If it helps you to blame the greedy corporate masters who want to squeeze more productivity out of their engineering group, then think that. It’s true. But it’s also true that engineers don’t want to work with yesteryear’s tech or obscure client cases, because that experience isn’t valuable for their career.

Blame the ui frameworks like react for this. It’s normalized a large cross-section of devs not learning anything about how a server works. They’ve essentially grown up with a calculator without ever having to learn long division.

It's worse than this even. I have an old Raspberry Pi 3B+ (1G) that I got in 2018. I hooked it up the other day to mess around with it, it's been maybe 2 years since I did anything with it, ever since I got a Pi 4 (4G). 1 gigabyte of RAM is now insufficient to browse the web. The machine freezes when loading any type of interactive site. Web dev is now frameworks piled on frameworks with zero consideration for overhead and it's pure shit. Outrageous.

JavaScript is needed to actually build anything useful. It is way easier to maintain and when done properly it can be very fast to load and use.

The problem with today's web is that pages are extremely inefficient and bloated. You can keep the same UI just don't try to use every framework and library under the sun. Also it would be nice if people actually formated assets properly instead of using tons of large images and other assets.

If it's a standard webpage that only displays some static content, then sure.

But everything that needs to be interactive (and I'm talking about actual interactivity here, not just navigation) requires Javascript and it's really not worth the effort of implementing fallbacks for everything just so you can tell your two users who actually get to appreciate this effort that the site still won't work because the actual functionallity requires JavaScript.

It all comes down to what the customer is ready to pay for and usually they're not ready to pay for anything besides core functionallity. Heck, I'm having a hard enough time getting budget for all the legally required accessibility. And sure, some of that no script stuff pays into that as well, but by far not everything.

Stuff like file uploads, validated forms and drag and drop are just not worth the effort of providing them without JS.

Most don't even know @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark/light), rather cobble something with JS that works half of the time and needs buttons to toggle.

Funny, from my standpoint, more functional JavaScript almost always feels like service degradation - as in, the more I block, the better and the faster the website runs.

I don't know how you're gonna get everything to work without JavaScript. You can't do a lot of interactivity stuff without it.

I wrote my CV site in React and Next.js configured for SSG (Static Site Generation) which means that the whole site loads perfectly without JavaScript, but if you do have JS enabled you'll get a theme switching and print button.

That said, requiring JS makes sense on some sites, namely those that act more like web apps that let you do stuff (like WhatsApp or Photopea). Not for articles, blogs etc. though.

Fair, some websites do need JavaScript though. Such as webapps. Could they be server-side rendered?

They also continually forget that you can't do frontend only validation for things.

Not even possible to reply to this post using the Lemmy Web UI without having Javascript enabled; the reply button doesn't function without Javascript.

Some surely know, they just don't care.

i run with scripts disabled by default. it gets annoying at times, but most sites and pages i go to work fine. a few are true 'apps' and are whitelisted. random sites that don't work i just search for an alternative source if i really want to read it. i have separate browser installs with fewer restrictions that i use specifically for certain things (like webmail or the little online shopping i do).

the few web sites that i am responsible for... all work without scripts. many of the visitors i care about have shitty internet, so i don't want massive js or css bundles in there or tons of unoptimized graphics or media.

Graceful degradation - pfft.

Progressive enhancement - yeah!