A day without JavaScript • Hacker News Board

Re: A day without JavaScript

#211

Post by syrrim » Wed, Jun 07, 2017, 4:13 PM UTC

always_good wrote: post #146

linkmotif wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I simply will not spend time tailoring a nascent or even mature product to 0.0001% or whatever minscule percentage of the population turns off JS. If you turn off JS, you get a blank screen. Why should I accommodate your cohort? Why write unit tests for someone who takes a standardish client with above 1% market share and does something completely unstandard with it?

I find that it's at least (usually more) double the work to build the JS-free version of something for a fraction of the user experience. For example, imagine a forum where clicking the "edit post" button turns your post into a editor and saves with AJAX so that you can continue scrolling once you make your edit. To build the JS-free version, you typically need a separate endpoint, a new template, a redirect, and a l…

Non js users aren't expecting the website to work perfectly without scripts on. The bare minimum they ask for is that the site can be read without using scripts. Obviously it would be nice if all the moving components didn't need scripts either, but most people can accept that this is too much work.

Re: A day without JavaScript

#212

Post by CoryG89 » Wed, Jun 07, 2017, 4:13 PM UTC

For me, the main take-away is:

> …it’s a sad indictment of things that they can be so slow on the multi-core hyperpowerful Mac that I use every day, but immediately become fast when JavaScript is disabled.

> It’s even sadder when using a typical site and you realise how much Javascript it downloads. I now know why my 1GB mobile data allowance keeps burning out at least…

As a developer, I understand not wanting to devote a large amount of time, catering to some insignificant portion of your audience who disables JavaScript.

And I love JavaScript, but I cringe at the thought that we are needlessly slowing things down with MBs of JS that change too often to be meaningfully cached.

If you are serving MBs of JS after gzip, please make sure that I am not going to have to download all of it every time I pull up your site on my phone every week or so.

Re: A day without JavaScript

#213

Post by mathw » Wed, Jun 07, 2017, 4:15 PM UTC

gpderetta wrote: post #167

ams6110 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might make sense to think about who disables JS. Likely it's technically knowledgeable people with a concern for privacy and security. If this describes your users or customers you may benefit from at least some level of non-JS functionality.

those knowledgeable users might be installing JS blockers in their friends and family computers right now.

And then they get "since you played with my computer the internet doesn't work properly".

Re: A day without JavaScript

#214

Post by cr0sh » Wed, Jun 07, 2017, 4:18 PM UTC

4c2383f5c88e911 wrote: post #94

VMG wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will last even longer without CSS

And most websites that work without JS also work fine without CSS. Almost like a pattern that can be found in properly built websites.

You know - at one time we built plenty of websites - and in some cases applications - using little to no javascript (either it didn't exist, or it was only used for very minimal things) or any CSS (it didn't exist).

So what could we do today? That is - if we purposefully limited ourselves to just basic HTML, and server-side processing, without any (or minimal) CSS or javascript, and only using the (expanded) tag and attribute HTML we have today?

I don't know for sure - but I believe we could create some amazing things.

Think about it this way: Look at what demoscene people are able to create when they put extremely artificial challenges in front of themselves; we could try to do the same - and see what happens?

Perhaps there needs to be a demoscene-like competition space for this kind of stuff (how much can you get done in under 100k browser-side? 10k? 1k? Limit bandwidth to the backend, too, and maybe server-side size of code?).

Just some random thoughts - it might be something I'd have to try myself, but maybe this post might inspire someone to do it as well...

Re: A day without JavaScript

#215

Post by gtramont » Wed, Jun 07, 2017, 4:21 PM UTC

> "(…) but I just can’t get down to less than 30 in any one window"

Just like me! I also suffer from the same disease, but on a much more serious level… lol! Everything just crashed yesterday and the count was on 270+… :-o

Re: A day without JavaScript

#216

Post by spiderfarmer » Wed, Jun 07, 2017, 4:26 PM UTC

expertentipp wrote: post #176

spiderfarmer wrote: post #8

One of my clients loads a 4.5 Mb bower.js (including Angular with a lot of components and jQuery), they also include an extra jQuery script, a full jQuery UI and several other scripts on each pageload . Nothing is minimized. The bower file alone has 300k in comments. The CSS file is also nearly 1 Mb. It's just a simple website with some forms. They have 2 developers working on the site, a scrum master, a project mana…

> They have 2 developers working on the site, a scrum master, a project manager and 2 testers ... and daily standups? so busy working that there is no time to do the job

Exactly. And the people around the developers are busy coming up with things that make them look busy.

Re: A day without JavaScript

#217

Post by reitanqild » Wed, Jun 07, 2017, 4:27 PM UTC

jaclaz wrote: post #187

reitanqild wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#1 is largely a matter of personal opinions This is wrong. It's amazing what Javascript can do now but it is only amazing because it was a retarded child with abusive parents (early browsers with wildly different implementations). That taken into account its amazing how far it has come. Sincerely, The frontend developer

> #1 is largely a matter of personal opinions >This is wrong. ... in your opinion ...

>>>#1 is largely a matter of personal opinions

>>This is wrong.

>... in your opinion ...

Yep. But sometimes my opinion is right ;-)

Re: A day without JavaScript

#218

Post by AstralStorm » Wed, Jun 07, 2017, 4:30 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #112

inimino wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, a polyfill is not a library. It's a dozen lines, not a thousand.

> No, a polyfill is not a library Yes, it is. > It's a dozen lines, not a thousand A polyfill can be any size, but there's no size minimum to be a library.

Some people are mistaking a book (actually a module) for a library.

Re: A day without JavaScript

#219

Post by gpderetta » Wed, Jun 07, 2017, 4:32 PM UTC

neurotrace wrote: post #202

gpderetta wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not ridiculous, machine crippling JS malware is a click a way and you will never know until you click. The safe strategy is JS off by default plus whitelisting. > wouldn't use a browser because I once went to a website that displayed a popup you would use a popup blocker though.

> machine crippling JS malware is a click a way I have been using the internet nearly daily for about 20 years now. I can't recall a single time I clicked on something that gave me "machine crippling JS malware". Barring some serious security gaps, JS isn't even capable of doing anything more than lock up the browser and maybe send some extremely minimal information about you back to someone elses server.

Crippling in the sense that I have to forcibly kill whatever browser I'm using because it is using 100% cpu and the machine becomes very unresponsive.

Re: A day without JavaScript

#220

Post by sdomino » Wed, Jun 07, 2017, 4:35 PM UTC

I lol'ed at the part about tabs/One Tab, because I have that exact same problem...

I have something like 300 tabs saved in One Tab, which is a huge improvement on what it used to be (> 1000).