I'm just learning JS - I've had plenty of experience with more technical scripting languages, but I'm still a JS newbie.
Is that a bad practice just because that kind of code is optimized for desktop use or is it just bad practice in general?
Also, a broader topic I'm wondering about: JS and HTML seem pretty clumsy. I find it hard to believe that they're really how the majority of web pages run. Is there really no alternative? Or is it just the case that these tools are "good enough" and what really creates problems is bad code(rs)?
The tools are "good enough" but just barely, and very good coders have gone to herculean lengths to make them usable. The thing is that these spectacular achievements are available to all, making it into a decent platform.
But naked HTML/CSS/Javascript is a document/hypertext engine perverted into a general-purpose platform.
The thing is that the JS libs and practices used for desktop generally aren't mobile-friendly so even though everything works across all the platforms, it's not necessarily usable.
It's not easy to say whether it's a bad practice or not. I think more than any other platform, how your application is going to be used, and who it's going to be used by are vital points of information that you need to answer before you approach the issue:
1) Are your visual flourishes vital to the quality of your product?
2) How concerned are you with baseline performance?
3) How big is your application? Do you need disparate components to be reusable, or do you need a philosophy or underlying framework to guide development?
4) Is your application going to be used on mobile?
The answer to 1 dictates how you should approach things like animating elements. Much of the time, the animation is really just a visual flourish, and can be handled with graceful degredation through CSS. Plus you can learn a few tricks using just CSS that don't trigger unnecessary redraws that might happen using JS.
The answer to 2 dictates whether or not you should adopt an existing framework or library vs. rolling your own. Libraries have gotten better about making themselves available piecemeal, but if you know how to write quick code, you'll often find almost everything is not quite what you absolutely need. See Canvas game dev.
Question 3 will determine what sort of framework you'll want. Something that is extendable and object-oriented, vs. something that has more self-contained reusable components. The drawback of the former is that classing in JS brings in a considerable performance hit, whereas reusable components make for much more unmaintainable code.
Question 4 will play a roll in all the aforementioned questions, namely where matters of performance and DOM redraws are concerned, as that's where mobile tends to fall flat when it comes to web apps.
Is that a bad practice just because that kind of code is optimized for desktop use or is it just bad practice in general?
I think the point here is that if you use Javascript to animate, that runs in, well, Javascript, and has to be called constantly. If you set a CSS property to achieve the same animation, the computations for it are done in native code. It still gets drawn the same way, but it's basically throwing away CPU for nothing (unless you do something that can't easily be replicated by CSS of course).
Is that a bad practice just because that kind of code is optimized for desktop use or is it just bad practice in general?
Also, a broader topic I'm wondering about: JS and HTML seem pretty clumsy. I find it hard to believe that they're really how the majority of web pages run. Is there really no alternative? Or is it just the case that these tools are "good enough" and what really creates problems is bad code(rs)?