The World Wide Web and the Death of Graceful Degradation
1 min read
Summary
The web has changed for the worse since the its early days, with the first version of HTML and slow dial up modems being the norm.
Now websites are essentially web applications, with increasing amounts of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML5 being used, to the point where they break if you don’t use the latest browser, or cannot install a particular browser extension.
This has come about mainly because of the changing role of the website from an online document format, to an app.
The way websites are built today means that users need to have the latest hardware and software just to load a webpage, and even the simplest pages can struggle to work on low spec smartphones.
Some website developers still design websites with a nod to the past and make sure that even old browsers can still access their sites, but this is the exception these days.
Even the way the web browsers are developed has become increasingly closed, with frameworks such as WebExtensions only allowing the addition of proprietary extensions to the browser, and moves to restrict the use of even such extensions.
