When building interactive features on a webpage, JavaScript is usually the way to go. However, with great JavaScript dependencies comes great website instability. Even a minor undefined element can cause your entire webpage to crash. That’s where going back to the basics comes in. Thanks to modern Web APIs, it’s now possible to reduce JavaScript dependency on a website by swapping out JS components for their native HTML element or CSS feature counterparts. In this talk, we’ll take a look at how to use HTML and CSS to build simpler alternatives to popular JavaScript components such as accordions, modals, scroll transitions, carousels etc We’ll also take a look at the performance and accessibility benefits and real-life applications and use-cases of these components.

How many times did we read about JavaScript being a bad language, JavaScript being on its way out and that technology X would kill it. In this talk, we will take a look at the lessons learnt from attempts at killing JavaScript. We will start as early as the late 90s where the battle for web-domination was still open. Then we will travel through time to understand the current state of an hypothetical javascript-less web platform.