A website's job is serving up pieces of information. Helping me navigate that information is the browser's job. That's why we have amazing innovations like the back button, tabbed browsing, and bookmarks. Imagine a world where every website had its own buggy implementation of those.
Also, simplicity of core architecture leads to diversity of tools. If Google's first crawler had to execute JavaScript and make sense of single page applications, Google wouldn't exist today. So be careful when you encourage websites to become more complicated.
> That's why we have amazing innovations like the back button, tabbed browsing, and bookmarks. Imagine a world where every website had its own buggy implementation of those.
Heh. We had a requirement to put in a back button. We put it in. Since no decent criteria were available to specify how it behaved, we just called history.back().
They did some user testing. Then they asked us to take it out again.
Never have I enjoyed taking on a ticket like I enjoyed taking out that stupid bloody back button.
Also, simplicity of core architecture leads to diversity of tools. If Google's first crawler had to execute JavaScript and make sense of single page applications, Google wouldn't exist today. So be careful when you encourage websites to become more complicated.
Tim Bray said it well in 2003: "Browsers are more usable because they're less flexible." https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePl...