Someone I met recently met who delegates work to web developers for a living had this to say about JavaScript frameworks: They are very seldom necessary for a job, and their main function is to create more work for more developers to get paid.
> The idea of HTML et al is a document markup language that would grow. Its architects saw we were going digital and sat back and took a long view. A very long view. They laid the foundations for a language that would work with all the conceivable technology of the time, and would be expandable to the unconceivable technology that would follow. So that documents would never be unretrievable due to age. Ever. A browser in 2050 would be able to read a 1994 document. And in 2094. And so on. They made a stand of cultural importance to the world.
The slow, less usable feeling of JavaScript-heavy websites — my current personal website included — has remained a constant, and I mourn the reduced usability of View Source as a map for learning, lost in the forest of DIVs and obfuscated JS in much of today’s World Wide Web.
I'd argue the opposite point, the problem with static websites is that they were bad at capturing state. That is what lead to the bloat of JQuery messes in websites and inefficient parsing of the HTML tree. Now that developers have so many platforms to target in so many ways, having a consistent way of state to permeate through websites reduces work.
Don't take me wrong, I love crafting my website 20kb of CSS over static files. Always sign me up for a static site, but for complex websites, where interactivty and state are needed, it's important to have these frameworks.
As an “old school” designer who writes HTML and CSS by hand, with JavaScript for progressive enhancement, I found myself agreeing, and it reminded me of this, from back in 2001: https://www.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/box_lesson/why.h...
> The idea of HTML et al is a document markup language that would grow. Its architects saw we were going digital and sat back and took a long view. A very long view. They laid the foundations for a language that would work with all the conceivable technology of the time, and would be expandable to the unconceivable technology that would follow. So that documents would never be unretrievable due to age. Ever. A browser in 2050 would be able to read a 1994 document. And in 2094. And so on. They made a stand of cultural importance to the world.
The slow, less usable feeling of JavaScript-heavy websites — my current personal website included — has remained a constant, and I mourn the reduced usability of View Source as a map for learning, lost in the forest of DIVs and obfuscated JS in much of today’s World Wide Web.