Ask HN: Why don't websites have 'text only' backup versions?

I was a developer of http://ocportal.com a few years ago. I can't take much credit for it though, since my contribution was a drop in the ocean compared to that of Chris Graham.

Far too often lately I've been seeing "RSS feeds" that are nothing but the title and a link to the webpage.

Running through:

W.r.t. "old-timers who got into the habit 10 years ago". A decade ago I was 11. Not exactly an old-timer.

W.r.t. performance, in an ideal world, you'd be absolutely right. But this is not an ideal world. There are far too many websites that are substantially less performant with JS. (Case in point: Gmail.). There are far too many websites that kill my battery life on my laptop via sloppy coding. There are far too many websites that don't stop downloading in the background to refresh things that I don't need refreshed, and in the process kill my bandwidth cap on my home connection. There are far too many websites that take multiple seconds before they even begin to render, because they are waiting on some library to load before they parse things clientside. Looking at you, client-side markdown. There are far too many websites that are less responsive on the "responsive" version with JS than with the fallback without JS.

W.r.t. download size, again, in an ideal world, you'd be absolutely right. But this is, again, not an ideal world. There are far too many websites that pull down multiple MB of libraries before they even start to load. Sometimes they are cached, but far too often they aren't. There are far too many websites, again, that refresh things that I don't need refreshed and as such continue to use bandwidth.

And you're missing two other things: the two concerns that I consider most important. One is security. The majority of browser exploits require JS, especially the nastier ones. As you say, JS engines focus heavily on performance. And trying to get high performance out of a JITted language goes intrinsically against security. For a certain amount of dev time, you can get decent security and decent performance, great performance and weak security, or great security and weak performance. It's an intrinsic trade-off. (The other one is user tracking, but I'm not going to get into that one here.)

And one other thing: with JS disabled, most of the time if a webpage is loaded it's actually loaded. I can keep it up and sit in a bus or something and read it, without an internet connection. With JS enabled, far too many websites end up breaking nastily some time down the line when they go to update something and fail. Again: not an intrinsic, but something far too many websites do anyways.

I think you've acquired a mistaken picture of Reader Mode. Reader Mode (like the Readable and Readability bookmarklets) presents an alternative rendering of the same set of files from which the standard view is rendered: it does not cause the server to serve an alternative set of files.

Reader Mode and the Readable and Readability bookmarklets fail often even on "text-centric" pages such as blog posts.

It basically amounts to two alternatives:

1) they make it intentional for whatever purpose - stop scrappers, prevent search engine indexing, pull in ads etc.

2) they make it out of incompetence - probably somebody with insufficient web development skills just used some popular JavaScript framework to quickly cook up a site

Now the majority of the customers won't care, but if you're targeting a professional audience, this will not score you any points. If you were a software development company hiring and I were to reply to your invitation, I would first go to your website. If I saw a blank screen in my browser, my first question to you would be why a serious company does have a broken site. Depending on what I heard I might skip you altogether.

Personally, I don't think there are any difficulties in doing a "text-only" version as you call it. That's how I always approach things - do a classic version then add some gradual enhancements. I can't imagine doing it the other way around actually.

And yes, you can call me out of touch with the times, but text pages rank higher and more credible in my eyes then all of the JavaScript toys I see around.