Computer scientists often look at Web pages in the same way that my friend looked at farms. People think that Web browsers are elegant computation platforms, and Web pages are light, fluffy things that you can edit in Notepad as you trade ironic comments with your friends in the coffee shop. Nothing could be further from the truth. A modern Web page is a catastrophe. It’s like a scene from one of those apocalyptic medieval paintings that depicts what would happen if Galactus arrived: people are tumbling into fiery crevasses and lament- ing various lamentable things and hanging from playground equipment that would not pass OSHA safety checks.

Describing why the Web is horrible is like describing why it’s horrible to drown in an ocean composed of pufferfish that are pregnant with tiny Freddy Kruegers—each detail is horrendous in isolation, but the aggregate sum is delightfully arranged into a hate flower that blooms all year. For example, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides “official” specifications for many client-side Web technologies. Unfortunately, these specifications are binding upon browser vendors in the same way that you can ask a Gila monster to meet you at the airport, but that gila monster may, in fact, have better things to do [1]. Each W3C document is filled with alienating sentences that largely consist of hyperlinks to different hyperlinks. For instance, if you’re a browser vendor, and you want to add support for HTML selectors, you should remember that, during the third step of parsing the selector string, “If result
is invalid ([SELECT], section 12), raise a SYNTAX_ERR exception ([DOM-LEVEL-3-CORE], section 1.4) and abort this algorithm.” Such bodice-ripping legalese is definitely exciting for people who yearn for the dullness of the Cheerios ingredient list combined with the multi-layered bureaucracy of the Soviet Union. Indeed, you could imagine a world in which browser vendors hire legions of Talmudic scholars to under- stand why, precisely, SYNTAX_ERR is orange and not mauve, and how, exactly, this orangeness relates to the parenthetic purpleness of ([DOM-LEVEL-3-CORE]). You could also imagine a world in which browser vendors do not do this, and instead implement 53% of each spec and then hope that no Web page tries to use HTML selectors and then the geolocation interface and then a <canvas> tag, because that sequence of events will unleash the Antichrist and/or a rendered Web page that looks like one of those Picasso paintings that you pretend to understand, but which everyone wants to throw into an
[1] “Gila Monsters Meet You at the Airport” is the name of a real children’s book that had an enormous impact on my emotional growth. The book’s unflinching realism inspired my own series of ill-received children’s books, such as “Spiders Ate Your Sister That We Never Talk About,” “Capitalist Advertising Makes You Hate Your Body and Buy Things Made from Slave Labor,” and “I Could Lie and Say that Your Comic Book Collec- tion Is Interesting, Or I Could Tell The Truth and Explain Why You Don’t Get Second Dates.”
ocean because nobody wants to look at a painting of a blue man who is composed of isosceles triangles and has a guitar emerg- ing from his forehead for no reason at all.

Given the unbearable proliferation of Web standards, and the comically ill-expressed semantics of those standards, browser vendors should just give up and tell society to stop asking for such ridiculous things. However, this opinion is unpopular, because nobody will watch your TED talk if your sense of optimism is grounded in reality. I frequently try to explain to my friends why they should abandon Web pages and exchange information using sunlight reflected from mirrors, or the enthusiastic waving of colored flags. My friends inevitably respond with a spiritually vacant affirmation like, “People invented flying machines, so we can certainly make a good browser!” Unfortunately, defining success for a flying machine is easy (“I’M ME BUT I’M A BIRD”), whereas defining success for a Web browser involves Cascading Style Sheets, a technol- ogy which intrinsically dooms any project to epic failure. For the uninitiated, Cascading Style Sheets are a cryptic language developed by the Freemasons to obscure the visual nature of reality and encourage people to depict things using ASCII art. Ostensibly, CSS files allow you to separate the defini- tion of your content from the definition of how that content looks—using CSS, you can specify the layout for your HTML tags, as well as the fonts and the color schemes used by those tags. Sadly, the relationship between CSS and HTML is the same relationship that links the instructions for building your IKEA bed, and the unassembled, spiteful wooden planks that purportedly contain latent bed structures. CSS is not so much a description of what your final page will look like, but rather
a loose, high-level overview of what could happen to your page, depending on the weather, the stock market, and how long it’s been since you last spoke to your mother.

I could go on and on about the reasons why JavaScript is a cancer upon the world. I know that there are people who like JavaScript, and I hope that these people find the mental health services that they so desperately need. I don’t know all of the answers in life, but I do know all of the things which aren’t the answers, and JavaScript falls into the same category as Scientology, homeopathic medicine, and making dogs wear tiny sweaters due to a misplaced belief that this is what dogs would do if they had access to looms and opposable thumbs.

with a species of courage which can be distinguished only with difficulty from certifiable lunacy, he started in 1932 on a long series of test firings with nitroglycerine (no less!) only sightly tranquilized by the addition of 30 percent of methyl alchohol.