What's wrong with JavaScript? Simple answer: nothing.
In the world of web design and development, JavaScript, or often abbreviated as JS, is a high-level, interpreted programming language. It plays a huge role in making websites more appealing, attractive, responsive, interactive and more. In short, JavaScript enhances web pages to make them plain better.
This is because the language is characterized as dynamic, weakly typed, prototype-based and multi-paradigm.
Alongside HTML and CSS, JS is one of the three core technologies that power the World Wide Web's contents.
But can you create a good website without JavaScript? Yes. But to achieve the same result, it can be difficult, or maybe impossible.
So why web designers and developers want to eliminate JavaScript and opt to use HTML and CSS only? The reason is simple: simplicity. Without JavaScript, websites's core task can always be achieved, without the needs of a modern browser.
Below is a list of things a website can achieve without using JavaScript:
- Core tasks can run within any environment.
- Pages can be more stable, with less to no coding errors.
- No more relying on
noscriptfor fallback. - There is no need for testing and debugging to verify the JS works on multiple browsers.
- More secure without JavaScript-related security problems.
- Have less codes to run, making web pages faster to load.
- More friendly to mobile users.
- Increased robustness.
- Better for search engines and SEO attempts.
- Shorter development time and lower cost of maintenance.
As a multi-paradigm language, JS supports event-driven, functional, and imperative (including object-oriented and prototype-based) programming styles. But here, the language lacks any I/O, such as networking, storage, or graphics facilities. JS relies for these on the host environment in which it is used.
JS is widely used on client-side programming as well as server-side programming like using Node.js. It's also popular on desktop apps and internet-aware applications. Mobile programming and APIs also use JS.
JavaScript is great for a wide variety of applications, but developers won't be using JavaScript for writing high-performance game engines or competitive high-frequency trading programs. JavaScript has a lot of problems, and allows developers to do many things wrong. For example, it can silently run on errors in many cases.
However, if you want to build things that involve the internet with one of the most versatile tools out there, JS is certainly the option.