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Ask HN: Is the web ready to require JavaScript?

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Re: Ask HN: Is the web ready to require JavaScript?

#11

Post by kls »

firefoxman1 wrote: post #4
saiko-chriskun wrote: post #2

what kind of browser nowadays don't support javascript? I don't know about you but the idea just sounds totally foreign to me. I'm too busy worrying about what HTML5 features modern browsers support :P.

Well the main issue isn't that browsers don't support Javascript, but that some people disable running scripts or have plugins like noscript that disallow scripting.

Even with the disables ones added in, the business case is just not there: http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2010/10/how-many-...

Re: Ask HN: Is the web ready to require JavaScript?

#12

Post by kls »

MostAwesomeDude wrote: post #6
saiko-chriskun wrote: post #2

what kind of browser nowadays don't support javascript? I don't know about you but the idea just sounds totally foreign to me. I'm too busy worrying about what HTML5 features modern browsers support :P.

Curl doesn't support JavaScript. Neither does wget. If I'm on a netbook, tablet, or phone, your JavaScript will chew my battery. I don't want that. I don't trust you. Don't take it personally; I don't trust most websites. I haven't signed your key, and you haven't signed mine. I am not okay with letting you execute code on my machine. Your JavaScript sucks. Again, don't take it personally; it's a tricky and frustrati…

You represent < 2% of the market, you examples do not represent the majority of most sites customer or user base. As such business should make decisions based on the demographics of their users. The reality is their is a finite amount of capital businesses have to spend on software efforts, as such they have to prioritize their spending based on the most amount of impact for their money. Further, they have to compete with the usability and features of their competitors so their is pressure to adopt more modern practices to provide software that users become accustom to as industry norm.

Re: Ask HN: Is the web ready to require JavaScript?

#13

Post by subsection1h »

I think it's funny how many commenters assume that people whose user agents don't support JavaScript are "relics" or need "a new computer with a modern browser". In my experience, people who use NoScript, for example, are much better equipped (technologically, etc.) than those who don't.

That said, people whose user agents don't support JavaScript get a big fat warning message after they log in to any of the web apps I've recently worked on.

Re: Ask HN: Is the web ready to require JavaScript?

#14

Post by MostAwesomeDude »

kls wrote: post #12
MostAwesomeDude wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curl doesn't support JavaScript. Neither does wget. If I'm on a netbook, tablet, or phone, your JavaScript will chew my battery. I don't want that. I don't trust you. Don't take it personally; I don't trust most websites. I haven't signed your key, and you haven't signed mine. I am not okay with letting you execute code on my machine. Your JavaScript sucks. Again, don't take it personally; it's a tricky and frustrati…

You represent < 2% of the market, you examples do not represent the majority of most sites customer or user base. As such business should make decisions based on the demographics of their users. The reality is their is a finite amount of capital businesses have to spend on software efforts, as such they have to prioritize their spending based on the most amount of impact for their money. Further, they have to compete…

Okay, fine, here's a better example. People with disabilities. Is your JavaScript ADA-compliant? Is it business-savvy to ignore your legal requirements towards them?

Re: Ask HN: Is the web ready to require JavaScript?

#15

Post by kls »

MostAwesomeDude wrote: post #14
kls wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You represent < 2% of the market, you examples do not represent the majority of most sites customer or user base. As such business should make decisions based on the demographics of their users. The reality is their is a finite amount of capital businesses have to spend on software efforts, as such they have to prioritize their spending based on the most amount of impact for their money. Further, they have to compete…

Okay, fine, here's a better example. People with disabilities. Is your JavaScript ADA-compliant? Is it business-savvy to ignore your legal requirements towards them?

Yes, A good toolkit like Dojo not only is WAI and A11Y compliant, but it exceeds the abilities of web 1.0 framworks, instead of having things like high contrast plugins for browsers they are baked right into the toolkit and are activated based on browser meta data. Part of my consultancy is web accessibility modernization through JavaScript toolkits. Web 1.0 frameworks, as of today, cannot comply with the upcoming legislation, but the larger JavaScript toolkits are already there and have the most complete implementations available. Further the current set of laws only require that a screen reader such as JAWS works on a site which JavaScript has no bearing on, we do tons and tons of JAWS testing in my organization. The future of the web is being increasingly implemented in JavaScript toolkits, the shift has already happened, as such the toolkits are starting to surpass the offerings that are available in the old server side frameworks. Because they are increasingly getting developer mind share. Accessibility is one of those areas that they are way out in front on. http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/dijit/a11y/statement....

Re: Ask HN: Is the web ready to require JavaScript?

#16

Post by MostAwesomeDude »

kls wrote: post #15
MostAwesomeDude wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, fine, here's a better example. People with disabilities. Is your JavaScript ADA-compliant? Is it business-savvy to ignore your legal requirements towards them?

Yes, A good toolkit like Dojo not only is WAI and A11Y compliant, but it exceeds the abilities of web 1.0 framworks, instead of having things like high contrast plugins for browsers they are baked right into the toolkit and are activated based on browser meta data. Part of my consultancy is web accessibility modernization through JavaScript toolkits. Web 1.0 frameworks, as of today, cannot comply with the upcoming le…

People aren't using good toolkits. People are open-coding everything. You might have gotten it right, but Joe JS Developer isn't.

Have you considered slimming down your walls of text? You seem to be using lots of words to say "no u," and it's tempting me to draw parallels between the simplicity of the JS-less Web and the relative complications of the JS-ful Web.

Re: Ask HN: Is the web ready to require JavaScript?

#17

Post by prodigal_erik »

The web is human-accessible content hosted at stable linkable URLs. If you send fragments of ad hoc data and rely on just one piece of code that might be able to reassemble them into something usable on a couple out of all browsers, that's not a useful contribution to the web, it's merely a client/server app which tunnels yet another nondisclosed protocol over HTTP. Somehow we ended up with a new crop of devs who don't see how terrible client/server was (your data is trapped in a silo, there's only one app capable of doing anything with it, it sucks, and you can't fix it) or why the web was such an improvement, so they're abandoning it and we're all going to take a huge step backwards.

Re: Ask HN: Is the web ready to require JavaScript?

#18

Post by kennu »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #17

The web is human-accessible content hosted at stable linkable URLs. If you send fragments of ad hoc data and rely on just one piece of code that might be able to reassemble them into something usable on a couple out of all browsers, that's not a useful contribution to the web, it's merely a client/server app which tunnels yet another nondisclosed protocol over HTTP. Somehow we ended up with a new crop of devs who don…

I think the web can still be human-accessible content hosted at stable linkable URLs. But now the question is, can we require the user-agent to support JavaScript in order to show the content, like we already require it to support HTML.

Re: Ask HN: Is the web ready to require JavaScript?

#19

Post by tobylane »

I wouldn't mind (and do intend to, even for a school website) having so much javascript on a page that it looks different, even broken without it, but I wouldn't load the content with javascript like Twitter do, that's too far (and may well always be). Mostly because I want to support screenreaders, or curl/wget.
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