Back in the 2000s in the web standards development community there were multiple web development strategies called "progressive enhancement", "graceful degradation" and "unobtrusive javascript":
There were a lot of practical reasons for that: The browser landscape was much more diverse, different browsers had different support of standard Javascript, some browsers didn't even support JS and some people still kept text-only browsers like lynx/links in mind. Also browsers were not evergreen, so a large part of the audience could be on some older versions. Another thing were sometimes brittle network connection, especially over mobile. Depending on JS could in the case of corruption mean non-functioning websites.
For a lot whose exposure to web development and the discussions abound that, that reason will be stuck in their head, even if in the last decade of React ets the "best practices" will have changed.
There is also an aesthetic thing: There is a thing of beauty in simply curling an url and piping it into grep or such to get the thing you need, instead of having so have an headless browser. In my mind that is still how the web should work.
I was surprised to see an Eckart Walther cited as an co-creator of RSS. That was news to me, and I followed the RSS wars since 2000. I thought I knew the names of everyone involved.
Turn's out: he really is. RSS was created by Ramanathan Guha, Dan Libby and Eckart Walther at Netscape first as an RDF Site Summary but only Guha and Libby are named on the original specs. That format then got transformed into a pure XML-based format, then merged with Dave Winer’s format, who then became chief author for the following RSS 0.9x and 2.0 versions. And of course in parallel there were the rivalling RSS 1.0 specs (again RDF based) and the Atom effort.
Should anybody be interested in now obscure histoy: Twobithistory did a longer retrospective of the feed wars:
Also: They don't really work in other countries or demographics. Generational bins presume that shared experiences form a somewhat comparable outlook on life.
I am a Xennial. I grew up in Western Germany. Are my life experiences the same as someone who grew up in Eastern Germany, experienced the fall of the Wall and all the economic and political disruptions afterwards in their formative years or by witnessing their family's experiences? My life didn't change, the country got a little bit bigger. Theirs in many measurable and unmeasurable ways. Are we the same generation?
And that was a peaceful revolution. Other countries weren't/aren't such lucky.
Some modern electrical solutions seem to be very near this ideal. Take a look a Mahle, their rear hub motor and small in-frame batteries only seem obvious I you take a close look.
(What I'd love to see are more cheap bikes and bike components. I'm currently searching for an “acoustic” commuter bike and I find solid bikes are rather soon outside my preferred budget.)
Interestingly there was a real attempt to build an E-Puzzler for shredded documents, to reconstruct the torn Stasi files after the German reunification. But while the system worked for defined stuff, but failed for mass reconstruction of documents with different formats:
That's depends very much on age, class, geographic location. Someone could have grown up imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain, hence learning Russian as a second language. Nonetheless they deserve appliances, websites and infrastructure which they can use and understand.
https://www.mysteryfleshpitnationalpark.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_Flesh_Pit_National_Par...