Sonnie Sedge ha provato a navigare senza Javascript per una giornata intera, segnandosi le difficoltà incontrate in diversi luoghi della rete.

Mentre è normale e accettabile che web app complesse non funzionino con Javascript disabilitato (Google Maps), è giusto che siti di informazione (come la BBC, o Wikipedia) risultino accessibili anche senza, e che Javascript non ne comprometta la velocità di accesso:

I maintain that it’s perfectly possible to use the web without javascript, especially on those sites that are considerate to the diversity of devices and users out there. And if I want to browse the web without javascript, well fuck, that’s my choice as a user. This is the web, not the Javascript App Store, and we should be making sure that things work on even the most basic device.

WordPress:

The new WordPress.com codebase, codenamed “Calypso,” moves WordPress.com away from MySQL and PHP. It’s built entirely in JavaScript, and communicates with WordPress.com only using our REST API. This means the new WordPress.com is a browser-based client for our API, just like any other application built on top of it — lighter, faster, and more flexible for a mobile-focused world.

È completamente in JavaScript, basato su REST API 100% aperte. In altre parole, fa a meno di PHP e MySQL. Ma.tt, sul proprio blog, motiva la decisione di abbandonare le fondamenta utilizzate fino ad ora così:

The basic paradigms of wp-admin are largely the same as they were five years ago. Working within them had become limiting. The time seemed ripe for something new, something big… but if you’re going to break back compat, it needs to be for a really good reason. A 20x improvement, not a 2x. Most open source projects fade away rather than make evolutionary jumps.

So we asked ourselves a big question. What would we build if we were starting from scratch today, knowing all we’ve learned over the past 13 years of building WordPress? At the beginning of last year, we decided to start experimenting and see.

Invece di wp-admin, è possibile gestire il proprio blog (i propri blog) da un’unica interfaccia: quella di wordpress.com (che, fra l’altro, è diventato open source). È l’opzione di default per i blog su wordpress.com, mentre può essere attivata via Jetpack sui blog installati sul proprio spazio, tramite wordpress.org.

Spiegano:

Is this a new WordPress?

This is a new interface for WordPress, in use now at WordPress.com and in the desktop app. It’s a modern take on how to write and manage content, that retains the same open source WordPress at its central core, powering everything through our REST API.

Will this be replacing WP-Admin?

We’re laying an entirely new foundation for a generation of apps and services built on WordPress — but whether the Calypso codebase eventually becomes part of core WordPress and replaces WP-Admin is up to the WordPress community.

Qui c’è il dietro le quinte dello sviluppo. L’applicazione per Mac, invece, si trova qua.

Jeff Atwood, lo sviluppatore di Discourse[1. Per alcuni mesi lo utilizzati su questo blog]:

It seems the Android manufacturers are more interested in slapping n slow CPU cores on a die than they are in producing very fast CPU cores. And this is quite punishing when it comes to JavaScript.

This is becoming more and more of a systemic problem in the Android ecosystem, one that will not go away in the next few years, and it may affect the future of Discourse, since we bet heavily on near-desktop JavaScript performance on mobile devices. That is clearly happening on iOS but it is quite disastrously the opposite on Android.

Chrome su desktop però mostra performance pari se non migliori di Safari. La ragione risiede piuttosto in Android, nel processore: il migliore device Android in circolazione ha una performance peggiore dell’iPhone 5.

Notava John Gruber, nella sua recensione dell’iPhone 6S:

Take a look at Geekbench’s aggregate results for Android devices. In terms of single-core performance, there isn’t a single Android phone that beats the two-year-old iPhone 5S. Android devices fare better in multi-core benchmarks, because they have more cores (some have eight, many have four — the iPhones 6S still have only two cores), but single-core performance is a better measure for the sort of things you can feel while using a device. Apple is literally years ahead of the industry.