Building a no-js eCommerce store

The past few weeks I’ve been contemplating the importance of JavaScript in everything we do as developers. Most of the time it seems it’s there for syntactic sugar, or because we’re sort of got stuck with one of the MVC frameworks out there (Vue, React, Angular, Ember, etc...).

But is there actually a reason for using JavaScript everywhere? Do we really need inline validation on form elements? Can we not solve the same problems without using JavaScript?

I used accessibility as a starting point – I really like clean, semantic markup with correctly labeled and attributed html elements, and sometimes I feel that adding JS to that is just sprinkling it with unnecessary complexity.

I want to see whether I can build a modern looking eCommerce site that’s functional and easy to use for the end user, and looks okay, and would still work if I turn on the “Disable JavaScript” tickbox in my developer console.

I understand there will be some limitations, but I hope I can code around it. Also because of this, I’m not going to use any CMS for this. I’ll literally start with a simple html page, and go from there.

I shall keep y’all updated. Back to basics, fools!

Photo by Philipp Berndt on Unsplash