On 2016-02-29, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 2:43 AM, Grant Edwards <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote: >> On 2016-02-29, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> Abjuring JS may be a virtue (or at least, making it a non-critical >>> part of your web site), >> >> Except the marketing people who decide on the requirements will never, >> ever settle for what you can do with plain HTML/CSS. >> >> In my experience, HTML/CSS makes a pretty awful GUI for a non-trivial >> application. With some Javascript and sweat, you can almost make it >> to mediocre. > > That's why I said "may be". A pure CGI web site is pretty annoying > unless it's really brilliantly done. However, I prefer to see JS > restricted to actual interaction, instead of making it critical to the > basic layout.
Agreed. That's an excellent rule to follow. The introduction of the "flex" display type in CSS has (for me) completely eliminated the need for JS to concern itself with display and layout (other than the basic hide/show enable/disable of optional elements as part of an application's interaction logic). I don't know why it took so long for CSS to grok the basic idea that you almost always want to specify that some blocks should expand/contract to fill available space and some should remain at their "natural" size. GUI toolkits and markup languages like LaTeX seem to have understood that this was a very basic need for many decades, but there was never a clean, reliable way to do it CSS until recently. > A lot of web sites these days load nothing but a script > that goes and loads everything else, while you gaze at a splash > screen. IMO that's unideal. :) "Unideal" is too kind -- I would described it as something more like "the evil spawn of brain-dead incompetents". I often wonder what sequence of decisions/accidents get people to "solutions" like that. > However, even that is probably a losing battle. :( At least the era of using giant tables full of fragements of a single large gif image to do page-layout seems to have died a long-overdue death... -- Grant Edwards grant.b.edwards Yow! does your DRESSING at ROOM have enough ASPARAGUS? gmail.com -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list