> live-notifications if an email arrives
Then yeah, use an email client. It's not appropriate or efficient in the
slightest to have a tab constantly open in the background so that it can run
a lightweight JavaScript version of an email client.
> even a chat that shows all the contacts that are online.
That's a completely separate job from email. But again, use an XMPP client.
Web pages are not supposed to be software. They're supposed to present you
with information found on the Web, which neither email nor XMPP are a part
of.
> Pagination is considered to be old fashioned and tedious to use; users
expect pictures to dynamically load as they scroll down.
By God, nothing has ever annoyed me more than this design trend, and no, I
don't think it's done because "users expect" it. Infinite scrolling is the
worst idea ever conceptualized by a human. It makes things impossible to find
while offering no real advantages over regular pages.
To wit, with infinite scrolling:
1. You have to scroll until you find what you're looking for. You can't just
click on the appropriate page link. You can't take shortcuts. All you can do
is scroll, scroll, scroll.
2. The loading for each section takes just as long as a static, plain HTML
page with the same contents would.
3. On phones and tablets, you don't even have the "end" key, so you really do
have to constantly drag, drag, drag, drag your finger over and over again. No
shortcuts.
4. After a while, the page becomes so big that it takes forever to return to
the top of the page on phones, and no matter where you are, it becomes
inordinately difficult to find your way back to a previous point.
5. If you accidentally do anything to leave or refresh the page, you're right
back to the beginning. Just spent ten minutes scrolling trying to find and
old post, and accidentally clicked on a link? Sorry! You have to do that all
over again.
That last point especially.
I have also never met a single person who has said that they like infinite
scrolling better than simple pages. It's always "people" or some other vague
descriptor like that. Never any specific person, much less for a specific
reason.
> have to deliver eyecandy, because people want it.
Again, I have never met anyone who demanded eyecandy on websites. No one
cares. If the website looks good and presents the information it's supposed
to present, that's all the viewers need.
What I have seen plenty of is users getting pissed because some badly written
JavaScript either slows their computer down, or makes a page take forever to
load, or ruins the back button, destroys their work, what have you. They
never know that JavaScript caused the problem, but it always does.
> And there is no reason not to do it if you release your javascript code
under a free license.
To an extent. A lot of JavaScript code is detrimental. But even if your
JavaScript code has no such problems, there is reason not to require it.
Again, that's for the reasons I outlined here:
https://onpon4.github.io/other/kill-js/
