I concur. I wrote a web interface for a crappy 20yo DSP last year, the thing doesn't even have an MMU and only 32MB of RAM. I basically put all the code in the browser, on the device there's only a very simple C HTTP server that serves the static files and blobs of data. In the end the UI looks fairly modern and responsive even though the backend is potato hardware.
I wouldn't say that client-side JS is underrated though. If anything I'd argue that the modern web heavily abuses it. Try browsing twitter or youtube with Javascript disabled for instance. The site simply won't work.
For YouTube I kind of still see a point, if only to not make scraping videos dead simple by not just having the plain URL of the video file in the html (yes there are still tools out there).
But twitter is so ducking ridiculous in that regard. At its core it is a web site to share 280 character long strings, but as of recently you cannot do this anymore without JavaScript! They shut down the legacy page at the end of 2020 that was blazing fast and a pleasure to use. And what irritates me the most about their modern Js based mobile page is that it frequently happens that I tap a twitter link on HN which takes forever to load, then it shows two blue spinners one at the top and one in the center and then after another eternity it says "this content isn't available". Then I hit reload, the whole thing repeats and this time the 280 characters display just fine. How? Just how do you end up with this?
I would argue that the fact that video content is often so frustrating to scrape is symptomatic of the massive cultural shift the web has seen over the past decade or two.
In the "old" web you could basically right-click -> save anything you want (ignoring plugin blobs for the sake of making my point more compelling). Meanwhile I tried manually scrapping a video from reddit the other day, I succeeded but it was quite the puzzle. First you have to find the right element in the DOM, then find the source which is a playlist for the various qualities available, then there was a 2nd indirection I think, then finally I got the URL of my video file.
My browser obviously knows about all of this but it won't expose it easily. No "Save video as" menu. For some reason I don't expect that Chrome will implement it any time soon...
Firefox exposes this stuff just fine: its context menu on videos has “View Video”, “Copy Video Location” and “Save Video As…”. (I thought that Chrome did too, but maybe my memory is faulty or maybe they removed it at some point.)
But sites can easily prevent all of this stuff from happening by putting something transparent on top of the video, so that you’re not actually right clicking on the video, but on another element.
And here’s the thing—there’s a sound technical reason why they all do that, and it’s not just legal nonsense. Those operations only make sense if you’re playing one video file, but as you remark, there are all the various qualities available, and all of these platforms are designed to be able to switch seamlessly between sources, so that the browser never does get told “play this single video file, it’s the whole thing”, but rather “here, play this (1080p) chunk”, then “here, now this (144p) chunk”, then “and now this 360p”—with the JavaScript monitoring everything and trying to make it flow as smoothly as possible at each step.
So… no, your browser actually doesn’t know about all of this, and that’s the reason that YouTube and the likes have stopped it from exposing it even in browsers that are otherwise willing to.
(You could still easily say that there’s a culture shift in this: in the distant past, the web valued simplicity and openness at the cost of performance and effectiveness; but as the internet went more and more mainstream, more and more developers broke ranks and insisted on unbreaking things for their users and improving performance and effectiveness, even at the cost of openness and simplicity.)
> Firefox exposes this stuff just fine: its context menu on videos has “View Video”, “Copy Video Location” and “Save Video As…”. (I thought that Chrome did too, but maybe my memory is faulty or maybe they removed it at some point.)
You're right, I never noticed that. Although I just tried on youtube and the option are there... but greyed out. Not sure why.
As for the various formats, if the web wasn't a javascript shitfest that would be exposed to the browser and it would decide what format it wants to use. That would help with all these websites with a crappy streaming implementation. That would also make downloading very easy, you could just select which format and bitrate you want.
Greyed out because there is no video location for you to view or save. It’s playing a stream, put together from many pieces, so that it performs and functions better.
Switching between sources mid-play is a lot harder than most realise, because random seek is expensive in videos. So instead you tend to treat it as a large number of files of a few seconds each that get glued together as you play it, and you can switch between them as you go.
The web platform could be extended to cover multiple-bitrate streaming and let the browser take control, but that’s a pretty complex affair, and I suspect that it still wouldn’t be enough to make these operations work—the browser would need a way of putting it back together again into one file.
I would imagine it's the result of inventing some busywork the keep the frontend team occupied after the product is "done" and the only thing it really requires is low amounts of maintenance.
That, and pushing more useds to the mobile application.
I wouldn't say that client-side JS is underrated though. If anything I'd argue that the modern web heavily abuses it. Try browsing twitter or youtube with Javascript disabled for instance. The site simply won't work.