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Why are we creating a JavaScript-only World Wide Web?
It’s 2019, and the vast majority of new websites tend to be built with JavaScript. They often require JavaScript to run in the end-user’s web browser in order to function. Should you disable JavaScript in your browser (which you can do, but in this day and age you need to be truly masochistic to even attempt this), most websites won’t work at all.
It’s not just the true applications of the web such as Gmail, Google Docs, etc., that require JavaScript to function. Even many of the simple content based websites such as news websites, company marketing websites, blogs, etc., require JavaScript just to display content to you. But websites were not always created this way.
Why did JavaScript become so ubiquitous? Are browser scripting languages needed to make the web work? Why did JavaScript surpass other scripting languages? Why is a single scripting language essential to the entire web? Why are web browsers not able to support more than one language today? And finally, what might the browser of the future look like? I hope to answer all of these questions, but first let’s travel back in time to the beginning of the web by having a quick look at where it all started, so that we can understand how we got to where we are today.
