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A day without JavaScript

sonniesedge.co.uk

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Re: A day without JavaScript

#361

Post by fineline »

ZeroClickOk wrote: post #277
mnm1 wrote: post #242

This is everyday for me. Just whitelist the few sites that actually need it and most of the rest are fine. This should be the default. What do I care if some images don't load or CSS is slightly off? The main content is there. For sites that won't do anything without JS, I can consider whether I want to use them or not. Mostly not. Fuck other people running code unnecessarily, without my permission, on my computer. E…

I fully agree. Do you stop to think flash/action script was "obsolete" because all this? and now we have the exact same problems...

I did a lot of Flash/Flex work - it was the bees knees of front-end dev in the days before JQuery, Firebug, Chrome etc. and was the most consistent across platforms, as the same plugin was used on each, as opposed to trying to make your web-standards-based app work on several incompatible implementations. HTML/JS/CSS didn't come close at that time, but there was hope that it would develop to make Flash obsolete - which it now has.

People always complained about how Flash "drained batteries" / "crashed browser" / "allows all this intrusive advertising". A case of blaming the technology for the way it was being used. People would say "I can't wait until Flash dies and we have the open web standards instead so we don't have these problems any more".

So, fast forward a decade or so, Flash has been replaced by open web standards and ... guess what? We still have those problems...

Re: A day without JavaScript

#362

Post by [deleted] »

godshatter wrote: post #196
godinaa wrote: post #29

One thing to consider is that at larger companies, we already have a difficult enough time testing all of our site with JavaScript enabled. Netflix building a version that works without JavaScript is like asking them to build a second website, especially from a QA perspective. When you look at your users and find that .5% of them are not running JavaScript, how do you justify spending the money for that few of people…

The NoScript extension is the 5th most downloaded extension for Firefox ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/?sort=us... ). If you want to show a blank screen or a broken website to those users, that's up to you. Some of them may really want to see your site, so they might try to figure out which of the twenty domains they should enable, and which of the thirty they should enable after that one doesn…

[deleted]

Re: A day without JavaScript

#363

Post by qudat »

ams6110 wrote: post #173
always_good wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For me, yes. I should be able to see at least the main content of your blog without JS. I don't care if it's perfectly formatted or styled. Just put the text in a div. When I go to a blog post linked from HN and see a white empty page I will just move on.

A blog post is one thing, but many web developers that venture onto this site -- myself included -- are building complex web applications that would simply not make any sense as a "read only" website.

You are more than welcome to disable JS, but the number of web developers that I've met that actually care about a non-JS user experience is next to zero.

Re: A day without JavaScript

#364

Post by qudat »

majewsky wrote: post #193
always_good wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But since you can't nest within other , your delete buttons can't appear in each row. Of course they can. The action submits via POST to an endpoint that disambiguates the selected action, and forwards inside the server side to the appropriate endpoint. Shouldn't be hard with a competent framework. Then, when JS is enabled, you override the click action on the action buttons, so that the action never gets used.

When you add up all of the ridiculous hoops web developers have to jump through for cross-browser compatibility, a non-JS UX is the least of their concerns.

You're asking web developers to come up with two methods to accomplish the same goal, which doubles the number of ways the app can break. It's totally unrealistic for any moderately complex web application.

Re: A day without JavaScript

#365

Post by qudat »

gpderetta wrote: post #122
bitwize wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you trying to browse the modern Web on your Windows 98 potato from last century?

My core 2 potato^Wlaptop from 2008 can run pretty much everything I throw at it quite well, except for the "modern" web.

What are you throwing at it? Word 2008? Command line? Winamp?

Re: A day without JavaScript

#366

Post by angus-g »

gvb wrote: post #222
jaclaz wrote: post #120

If I may, it seems to me like there are several possible points of discussion: 1) Javascript is bad (vs. Javascript is good and variations thereof) 2) The use a lot of websites make of Javascript is overcomplex, gratuitious, uncalled for, intrusive, etc. 3) Sites should provide some (even minimal) functionality to people browsing them without Javascript #1 is largely a matter of personal opinions #2 is a known, unden…

The sites that REALLY piss me off are the ones with a timed redirect like: http://www.example.com/nojavascript" /> which show a usable flash of the site for one second and then bounce me to a useless "You must enable JavaScript to use this site." page. By the flash I know that this is technically not correct.

NoScript includes a toggle to disable exactly this behaviour (meta tags within noscript tags). meta refreshes in general are pretty annoying as a user though

Re: A day without JavaScript

#368

Post by jholman »

throwaway47861 wrote: post #159
linkmotif wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. This is definitively YAGNI. Good engineering is accommodating the greatest number of people with the resources you have in the least amount of time. Thinking about some abstract future scenario is categorically not good engineering.

You misspelled "good bean-counting". Good engineering requires you to cover for everything you can. Case in point: car seatbelts and airbags. Most people don't crash, right? But you aren't seeing the car manufacturers remove seatbelts and airbags.

Good engineering requires good bean-counting. Figuring out what you can do with infinite resources is not good engineering (except perhaps when funded by DARPA).

As any good civil engineer knows... “Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.”

The essential characteristic of engineering is making mindful, appropriate tradeoffs between various costs and benefits, including features, risks, externalities, financial costs, etc.

Re: A day without JavaScript

#369

Post by ahakki »

sametmax wrote: post #262
zmodem wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ridiculously small? That could take 10 s to download on a 2G network.

Yeah, sure, most sites today are totally browsable in 2G. Event the damn native APP for hackernews, using only JSON, is not usable in 2G.

For me HN seems to be one of the few websites that is usable on 2G.

Re: A day without JavaScript

#370

Post by SquareWheel »

thinkxl wrote: post #355
SquareWheel wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you prefer that Hacker News reloaded the page every time you voted on a comment?

I wouldn't mind. But it doesn't work that way, look: https://vimeo.com/58808364

Interesting video, but it still seems to be a JS-driven technique?
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