Hackaday on the Web's sad transition from pages to apps

Maya Posch lamented the state of the modern Web and the death of graceful degradation:

Somewhere along the way, the idea of a website being an (interactive) document seems to have been dropped in favor of a the website instead being a ‘web application’, or web app for short. This is reflected in the countless JavaScript, ColdFusion, PHP, Ruby, Java and other frameworks for server and client side functionality. Rather than a document, a ‘web page’ is now the UI of the application, not unlike a graphical terminal. Even the WordPress editor in which this article was written is in effect just a web app that is in constant communication with the remote WordPress server.

This in itself is not a problem, as being able to do partial page refreshes rather than full on page reloads can save a lot of bandwidth and copious amounts of sanity with preserving page position and lack of flickering. What is however a problem is how there’s no real graceful degradation amidst all of this any more, mostly due to hard requirements for often bleeding edge features by these frameworks, especially in terms of JavaScript and CSS.

There’s a lot to like about the modern Web and perhaps we even take it for granted. We’re able to create amazing art and interactive multimedia that wasn’t possible even a few years ago. But that comes at a cost (quite literally) and it also sets a precedent for what the whole Web should be like. Do we need 150 scripts and other external server requests on a public health website? Why must everything be an app or an unoptimised JS framework with client-side rendering?

I’m a major proponent for better web performance, both in my work and as a regular Web user. But at some point developers and stakeholders are going to have to act and stop ignoring the advice we give to make the Web accessible for everyone and not just the small percentage of people with the latest iPhones, 5G, and/or fibre broadband.