Do you guys use JS or any sort of scripting language to build your site?

[angel-val]

I have only ever had bad experiences with JS in my admittedly limited overall time using it, and the ecosystem around it (NPM, frameworks, etc) is honestly headache-inducing in my opinion, so I have opted to essentially never use it as basically the only site I maintain is my own homepage.

I was wondering how much of y'all use JS, specifically for your web revival/personal homepage sites, and what you think of it generally?

(also, side question, is there any way of reusing HTML without JS? I'm planning on doing a homepage redesign soon and something like that would be convenient, but as established, I despise JS, but I've been so far unsuccessful in finding alternatives)

[Memory]

I personally don't. I want my sites to work on every browser no matter how old or minimalist. I test my site on Kristall, Netscape and Lynx before deploying.

As for reusing HTML, check out this reply I made:
https://forum.melonland.net/index.php?topic=836.msg5957#msg5957

[glacial_pace]

JS is good even for small bits of content that might change regularly. like if you want to show a copyright notice at the bottom of a page for example

Code: html

<p>Copyright <span id="date" /> by angel-val

Code: js

document.getElementByID('date':wink:.innerText = new Date().getFullYear()

would yield "copyright 2023 by angel-val"

but for the most part, websites don't need JS to be useful or even interesting. it's just impossible to get interactive elements on the screen without it.

[NacreousDreams]

I would give a serious word of caution to people who use JavaScript. I know from personal experience that it can be a very powerful- and dangerous- tool. Learned and tried it first hand in my software security class to hack into fake websites for demonstration purposes; if you're not careful, and don't take proper precautions to make your site secure, you could be open to some gnarly vulnerabilities.

I've used some JS on a site I built during an internship I took, but besides that, nah, I haven't used it. What I tried was painful, though. A friend of mine that I did senior capstone with swears by JS, but acknowledged that vanilla JS is tough to work with.

[nymphaeaphoo]

In terms of client side JavaScript, I think HTML and CSS shouldn't have a JS dependency, so that means not using React or something similar for simple things such as a blog or artwork portfolio. The only JS on my site is when JS is the whole point, that is you want to host a program on the web, so maybe you want to port your video game to webgl or in my case I have a painting program made in JS.

and obviously JS shouldn't be used for malware such as spying.

[glacial_pace]

i mean JS is the only scripting language browsers support so it's not like there's an alternative lol

[Melooon]

There's front end JavaScript (the kind the runs in someones browser) and backend JavaScript (the kind that runs on your web server) - as others have said, I think frontend JS should be kept to a minimum unless its really necessary (for a game or extra functionality) but the site should be usable without it. So for example, my frame link fixer script will fix URLs in frames if you have JS turned on, but its setup in such a way that the site does not NEED it to be there - it just adds a lil extra.

As for backend JS though! I use SO MUCH JavaScript behind the scenes on a lot of my projects TextureTown is entirely generated using JS, the Newsletter, Surf Club, Worm, my Monday site closing, all depend on it!

[worldwidewar]

I have a single info.json on my backend for things like the title, header, footer, etc. There isn't any scripting at all on the frontend though.
EDIT: I probably should've noted that my whole site generator is written in Python, but I still don't put any Javascript on my frontend.

[Memory]

I personally don't use any scripting. I write everything statically in a text editor and upload it manually via SFTP.

[Cele]

I think I have JavaScript in a music player

[isopod]

I'm of the opinion that the client should have to do as little as possible when rendering a webpage, so I try to keep client-side Javascript to an absolute minimum and serve static HTML whenever possible, but my backend is full of PHP code. I love adding dynamic features and automating simple backend tasks to minimize the amount of repetitive markup I have to write - for example, my art page is really just a PHP script that scans a directory for images and populates the page in chronological order based on file metadata, so all I have to do to update it is upload an image and the rest is taken care of for me!

[RodFireProductions]

A couple of my purely hand-coded sites use Vanilla JavaScript in their client for stuff like generating navigation links and opening modals. The rest of them are built using static site generators (SvelteKit and Hugo) so scripts get used less.

I've use vanilla, NPM, and frameworks. Believe it or not, I do kinda like working with Vanilla Javascript. I used to hate it in the past though.

I do want to try out Ruby on Rails and PHP though for web development in the future. I know some people have JavaScript disabled. It's not the easiest to get away from JavaScript when it's the easiest to get hosted with my budget of zero dollars and zero cents.

[tarraxahum]

Not being afraid to seem a totall noob, which I am, I'll admit I'm still at the part of "putting stuff together like lego bricks instead of coding it myself" and there's no guarantee I'll ever progress much further than that.

So as far as I'm aware my art gallery (which I wanted to work in a specific way) and my comic reader (aka rarebit) are both running on scripts, but I'd be hard pressed to tell you how much strain they put on a user's browser and which end they are running at...

[princemaggots]

My main site uses a small amount on the client side where it helps (music player, generating one out of a random list of quotes I have for the entrance page, injecting a back home button on non-home pages with the sidebar so I only have to maintain one sidebar page), but is mostly useable regardless save for one shrine (though I should put a <noscript> tag in a couple places now that I'm looking at it...). On my second site necronomicon though, that one is mainly run off of javascript for it's desktop version (since it's supposed to simulate a desktop screen), so I have a tag on the entrance page to tell the user to enable Javascript if they want to view it.

Overall, I like using JS now that I've worked enough with React to understand it, so I like building with it - but I like to give alternatives or at least something to the user if they don't have it enabled.

[brisray]

I try not to use JS unless I absolutely need it. HTML and CSS have advanced so much, my need for JS is decreasing, but there's some things it is indispensiible. I'm a great fan of Google Charts API - https://developers.google.com/chart and that depends on JS.