Introduction

Recently, I've re-written my website to be dumber, faster, and more secure. How did I do it?. It's simple, no more PHP or any server-side code, and no more javascript. I've gone back to the pre CGI 1993 era.

What's the problem with current websites?

The client side

Too many frameworks and libraries are used. This causes the websites to feel slow to load on slow connections, and also slow to use if you're using a low-end device, like a 5 years old phone.

This is why this website has 0 javascript. (yup, none, you can check.)

This website is made using only HTML5 and CSS3. This means that some old browser that you shouldn't be using for security reasons won't display it correctry, but do we really care about those?

The server side

Caching, databases, web servers, reverse proxies, containers, node.js packages… The stack that once was LAMP has become huge, complex, and hard to secure. This setup might feel simpler for users of high level languages that like running some docker images from random users, but abstraction of all of that infrastructure means most users don't know how and what their server run.

This is why this website is static, requiring only Linux, and Nginx. Everything is computed only once, when I re-generate the website after adding an article.

What's wrong with computing stuff client-side?

Computing something server-side means that you compute it once for potentially thousands of served pages. When you run that computation on the client, you've gone from one computation to thousands. A lot more energy is wasted, and your page feels slower to the user, since the browser had to compute stuff before displaying the page.

But once again, maybe you don't even need server-side code. More code means more potential security risks, but also worse performances.

Yeah but how can I do X without javascript?

It depends. One of the things you won't be able to do is Ajax. But is it really a problem? If your website is much faster to load, is reloading a page after filling a form that bad? Probably not.

Server-side code will most of the time be able to solve your problems.

For other things, html5 might already allow you to do such a thing:

You want to create a spoiler element that hides some text? Just use the details element.

Want to have a popup menu? it's a bit more complex, but with hidden checkboxes, you can achieve that.

Browsing the mdn website will allow you to discover a whole bunch of cool new features, like css grids, and video subtitle tracks, that work without any javascript.

Fun fact, depending on your OS, if you change the theme from light to dark, this website will also adapt! CSS3 is pretty cool.

In conclusion

I really hope that more people will think twice before adding huge frameworks and assets to their websites. Current HTML5 and CSS3 specs allows us to have quite complex websites, and javascript isn't really needed anymore.

If you still think that using javascript to prevent loading full pages is a good idea, check out this blog article by Carter Sande about this subject.