• Zachariah@lemmy.world
    2 months

    I took a very bold decision and built a new version of the site using Astro https://astro.build/. It was HTML-first. Javascript existed, in web components, but only to progressively-enhance a website that worked perfectly fine without it.

    My logic was thus:

    1. This is a public service
    2. It should work on every machine possible
    3. It should work when connections are poor
    4. The forms must never lose data once it is entered

    …

    The results? When we launched, the number of people completing the form doubled. The analytics people didn’t even know where these users were coming from. Of course, your javascript-based analytics package doesn’t see the users you are bouncing because of javascript failures. It was a flood! We also saw my “keep a backend session, never lose user data” approach pay off. In one case, someone completed a form a month after starting it.

    • screaming in digital@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2 months

      considering that I run with noscript on permanently, if the site immediately breaks, I just close the tab. if the site generally works, I will take the time to consider if JS is warranted. thank you for making sites that dont break the web.