Web Development < />

[Bitwor1d]

I was playing a bit with the things you need for creating your own website from scratch.

HTML, CSS and Javascript seem to be pretty stable foundation to build the building upon those software development kits.

I mean, If I want to create a simple, really accessible and low resource hungry website (just like debian's .org website). All I need it's just HTML and CSS respectively.

I don't know that much about web development, and as far as I'm concerned about the topic, Javascript is only supposed to provide interactivity to the website, but... If that's the case, HTML can also make use of buttons and similar stuff if all you want to do is create buttons to display on your website. You can also play audio files on your website using HTML only! Impressive!

What I'm trying to ask is why is Javascript so important when just by using HTML/CSS is more than enough to run a website?

At least, the style that I want for my future websites (as I don't have intentions of making them at the moment) is a simple, plain-text wise (with just a few colors) and accesible for almost all devices accross the globe.

 

[MikeRocor]

What I'm trying to ask is why is Javascript so important when just by using HTML/CSS is more than enough to run a website?

My personal web site uses some hand crafted HTML with a bit of hand crafted javascript to handle some image transitions. It does not even use CSS, except for one page that I recently added while learning about CSS. BUT it's a very simple web site with nothing interactive and most of it was written in about 1999 or 2000.

Where JS heavily comes into web site design is when the pages need to accept user input or access databases to produce content. Some web sites store -all- of their content in databases, so they are nothing without their JS.

While it is certainly possible to write the relevant JS by hand, that would be an expensive, complex and possibly error prone endeavor - which a public facing web page cannot afford, if only for security reasons. So "web programmers" us various javascript "frameworks" as the basis for their work. This is why some web pages have thousands of lines of javascript code (much of it probably unused) that, without lengthy study, you have little clue what it actually does. The web programmer who built the page almost certainly also has little grasp of what a lot of that code does. But don't worry - the framework came from a reliable source... like Google or MS or whatever. It's a lot like using shared libraries of compiled code.

There are other technologies/languages besides javascript but it seems to be the clear leader lately.