> Although taking Google on head-first would be foolishness worthy of Don Quixote, there are ways that we can change things for the better. One is to demand that websites we use and/or maintain follow either the Progressive Enhancement or Graceful Degradation design philosophy. The latter item is something that is integral with HTML and CSS designs, with the absence of, or error in any of the CSS files merely leading to the HTML document being displayed without formatting, yet with the text and images visible and any URLs usable.

Hopefully the strategy laid out in this article is adopted more and more. Frameworks such as SvelteKit [0][1] and NextJS [2] already allow developers that were used to develop bloated SPAs to create progressively-enhanced websites that work without client-side JavaScript. Also, the landscape of frameworks that don't really require client side JavaScript is getting pretty good with HTMX [3], Rails and co adopting HTML Over The Wire [4][5].

Unfortunately, the market incentives simply aren't there, there's not a lot of money in developing websites (or web apps) that work without client-side JavaScript and bloated browser APIs, so we're left to see if simply improving the tooling will be enough for developers to create less bloated websites (whether that's intention or not).

[0]: https://kit.svelte.dev/docs/form-actions

[1]: https://kit.svelte.dev/docs/glossary#hydration

[2]: https://nextjs.org/docs/guides/building-forms#part-5-form-su...

[3]: https://htmx.org/

[4]: https://hotwired.dev/

[5]: https://turbo.hotwired.dev/

I don't think the article called for 90s like software, just the general user experience. There were a lot of problems under the bonnet. One of those things though harder for a site developer was writing for the different browsers that surfed the net back then, and I still recall looking at page sources that streamlined use for a couple of different popular browsers of the time since otherwise the site would appear a bit broken.

A lot of people think texty stuff is over rated ... but also scream blue murder that the spiders crawling the web aren't doing a great job, because only big search has the permission to crawl and can correctly understand which version of the can can dance to represent the information a particular site uses.

Including a simple html text version minus bells and whistles of the same always seemed common sense to me, it opens it up the site to those with simple text browsers as well as anyone contemplating a better or real search engine.