>Really, it's hard to see what one truly needs JavaScript for
It's a Turing complete language. You truly need it if you want to do any computation in the browser, modify the DOM, work with Canvas or make asynchronous requests.
Yes, we could all go back to the way the web was in the early 90's when every site was nothing but text and images (and the occasional Java applet) but doing so would also disregard a lot of the very interesting things that javascript allows the web to do as a platform for serving applications as well as documents.
It may be true that most of the web might not absolutely need it, but let's not pretend it serves no valid purpose at all.
Yeah, I was being a bit negative. I'm actually not opposed to the idea of web apps (although I think that the sole virtue of HTML+CSS+JavaScript is that it exists): they really can be useful, and there's no good alternative (which is truly sad).
What annoys me to no end is 'apps' which are really just content browsers. I already have a content browser: it's called…a browser. There are well-defined semantics about how it retrieves content (resources). It works on the command line, within emacs, in a TTY, in a GUI and on my phone. It can be configured to run no untrusted code. It's really, really powerful.
It's a Turing complete language. You truly need it if you want to do any computation in the browser, modify the DOM, work with Canvas or make asynchronous requests.
Yes, we could all go back to the way the web was in the early 90's when every site was nothing but text and images (and the occasional Java applet) but doing so would also disregard a lot of the very interesting things that javascript allows the web to do as a platform for serving applications as well as documents.
It may be true that most of the web might not absolutely need it, but let's not pretend it serves no valid purpose at all.