You Used JavaScript to Write WHAT?
CIO Magazine · 2008
Info
2026 preface. I wrote this for CIO Magazine in January 2008. The central distinction the article was wrestling with — pages versus programs, JavaScript as enhancement versus JavaScript as application logic — has been comprehensively resolved by history in favor of programs. Not because pages went away, but because the line between the two collapsed. Node.js shipped a year after this article. React landed five years later. WebAssembly mainstreamed a few years after that. The Gmail-as-marquee-example bit reads especially quaint now; Gmail looks like the museum exhibit of a particular era’s idea of what a sophisticated web app could be.
What I’d write differently now: the entire framing of “is this a page or a program?” presupposes a stable category boundary that turned out to be temporary. The honest question in 2008 was probably what kind of program is this, and how aggressively does it need to behave like one? — which is the question that actually drove the modern web stack. The Halo 7 joke at the end of the article is the one prediction that aged well; modern WebGL/WASM games are genuinely competitive with native ones for many categories. The “different story” turned out to arrive faster than I expected.
The full original article is preserved as the PDF below.
The key to understanding when (and when not) to deploy JavaScript has as much to do with the intent of the target application as it does with JavaScript itself. Originally published in CIO Magazine, January 2008.