Date created: Oct 7, 2024 #web

Should you use JS?

I think ive complained about this in ramblings before but even I don't read those so I felt like id talk about it here. A lot of sites on the indie-web try to subtly flex that they have no JS on their site to varying levels of effect, I'm aware JS will slow down your site, but you know what else will slow down your site? The user needing to load several uncompressed 2mb images on every page which I see way too often in these sites who claim to not use any JS. I don't think the LastFM widget is going to do as much damage as you think I'm sorry to say.

It's not like I'm telling you to use JS on every page or anything though, the page you're on right now has zero JS and so do about half the pages on my site. I only use JS when I feel like I'm forced, like for my reviews page the only way I could have done keyboard events is in JS and I think 1kb of JS really isn't going to change the user's experience, especially on a page with like 50 high quality multi megabyte images that I forgot to lazy load until right now (whoops).

A location where JS is often used when I should be that id like to complain about though is in webrings. Onionring is a scourge and forcing people to load random JS from your personal site and to just trust you is a level of trust I don't have. This unfortunately forced me to learn how to use regex but shortish story short, now I have to host my own versions of the webrings variable files and basically just moved the JS to a different page, lot less JS though so its still a win I think. Can't have my home page getting more laggy, according to website carbon calculator I'm already killing 60 sea turtles on every site visit. That's all I had to say, and really I only made this blog post to complain about onionring. Fuck you onionring.