20 years ago, I was in the web site business. My partner and I had a customer who had a weird insistence that this site "HAVE ZERO JAVASCRIPT!" He'd heard something from someone about how it was bad, or whatever, and so was insisting we use NONE.
This made handling the forms way harder, obviously. In-page scripting to (e.g.) preserve form input properly on a failed submit, or to dynamically handle a date picker, was and remains pretty benign. So we set about creating a terrible example that would convince this guy to let us use best practices.
This meant I needed to write a perl script that created a no-javascript date picker. This date picker included an entry for every possible birthday for a user who might sign up, so it had every date from like 1/1/1930 through 12/31/1990 or whatever we figured was a reasonable boundary at the time.
We published the page and sent him a link, and in about 15 minutes we heard back. "Ok, I get it. Use scripting."
A potentially more horrifying example of programming chicanery came from the same era, when a reasonable solution to a given page problem was that I wrote Perl (using Mason) that wrote Javascript that wrote HTML.
This made handling the forms way harder, obviously. In-page scripting to (e.g.) preserve form input properly on a failed submit, or to dynamically handle a date picker, was and remains pretty benign. So we set about creating a terrible example that would convince this guy to let us use best practices.
This meant I needed to write a perl script that created a no-javascript date picker. This date picker included an entry for every possible birthday for a user who might sign up, so it had every date from like 1/1/1930 through 12/31/1990 or whatever we figured was a reasonable boundary at the time.
We published the page and sent him a link, and in about 15 minutes we heard back. "Ok, I get it. Use scripting."
A potentially more horrifying example of programming chicanery came from the same era, when a reasonable solution to a given page problem was that I wrote Perl (using Mason) that wrote Javascript that wrote HTML.
I am not sorry.