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A day without JavaScript

sonniesedge.co.uk

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Re: A day without JavaScript

#391

Post by throwaway47861 »

RussianCow wrote: post #314
throwaway47861 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter-counter-point: I am above 180cm (far from 200+ where many basketball players are) and many taxis aren't tuned for me and I bang my head on the ceiling so yes, I definitely call the manufacturers of those cars bad. Statistical averages are a back-patting technique between managers, let's face that reality, shall we? They very rarely have the customer's interests in mind.

You have to draw a line somewhere, though. Every engineering decision has a cost, whether time/money, opportunity cost, or design tradeoffs, so it's not practical to cater to every single user you have.

There are many people above 180cm.

Again, let's face it -- it's bean counting, some medium-level product manager wants a raise by saving expenses.

That's all it is, that's all it ever was, and it ain't ever gonna change while there are people on these positions.

Re: A day without JavaScript

#392

Post by throwaway47861 »

che_shirecat wrote: post #233
throwaway47861 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

what a ludicrous analogy. engineering is an applied science, not a purely theoretical one where you can remove the human impact of your decisions from the equation. comments like this are a prime example of why engineers need to take more liberal arts classes

It was a slightly exaggerated example. Nothing can be infinitely optimized of course, but the corner cutting in today's tech culture is a bit too much for my taste.

Re: A day without JavaScript

#393

Post by throwaway47861 »

jholman wrote: post #368
throwaway47861 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bene…

As I mentioned in another comment, it was a bit exaggerated example to illustrate a point, not to make the people nitpick it.

The corner-cutting in the current tech culture is a bit too much for my taste.

Re: A day without JavaScript

#394

Post by throwaway47861 »

Brockenstein wrote: post #281
throwaway47861 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Consumers by in large know driving is dangerous and safety features are something car manufacturers advertise to consumers. Not to mention over the last 30-40 years drivers have come to expect these sorts of features in cars because accidents happens and those features increase survivability, by a lot. The same sort of consumer expectation doesn't exist for no-javascript. Major browsers default it enabled. The web ha…

JS is necessary. But what do we do about the extensive tracking and extremely unoptimal requests, for which we already have numerous articles out there?

If there's no soft solution, disabling JS altogether is a good fish net for a lot of people -- yes the percent is close to a rounding error but the absolute amount can go to 1 million or more.

Re: A day without JavaScript

#395

Post by throwaway47861 »

postozoan wrote: post #330
throwaway47861 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You also don't see car manufacturers change their designs so that they will accommodate drivers who've decided to remove their steering wheel, nor do car manufacturers design their cars for some possible future world without gasoline.

I've had this one coming. Serves me right to believe contrived example won't be nitpicked. :D

Re: A day without JavaScript

#396

Post by throwaway47861 »

dang wrote: post #372
che_shirecat wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what a ludicrous analogy. engineering is an applied science, not a purely theoretical one where you can remove the human impact of your decisions from the equation. comments like this are a prime example of why engineers need to take more liberal arts classes

I agree with you about liberal arts and have the college transcripts to prove it. Unfortunately, your HN comments have been frequently uncivil and/or unsubstantive. Would you please not post like that? It's just what we're trying to avoid here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Would you be so kind to point out how would a liberal art knowledge would help people like me understanding the issues better?

I think I understand where my opponents stand, but I disagree with a part of them.

Re: A day without JavaScript

#397

Post by horsawlarway »

flukus wrote: post #349
horsawlarway wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good. Please leave. I don't walk into a restaurant and demand that they cook my food without using a knife. Don't expect modern websites to bend over backwards for a (frankly rather juvenile) view of a modern web standard. Code execution is part of the web, it's here to stay, the number of sites that support non-JS experiences will continue to dwindle. You're not some special snowflake. Other people make real decisio…

Where does the cost of making a blog readable without javascript com from? It takes a lot of extra effort to make a blog that requires javascript. As far as I'm concerned, if it's not readable without javascript then you've got nothing intelligent to say anyway.

>As far as I'm concerned, if it's not readable without javascript then you've got nothing intelligent to say anyway.

Great! Leave please. I have no desire to interact with folks who approach the world in that manner.

Re: A day without JavaScript

#398

Post by SquareWheel »

perilunar wrote: post #379
SquareWheel wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on the site, even just reading may be problematic. Imagine a webapp where all data is requested and sent as small JSON updates. This is faster and it's less data than full page copies, and can be more targeted to that user. To build this feature for the tiny fraction of non-JS users, you're looking at duplicating all of this functionality on the server. This greatly increases dev time and complexity of the…

Websites shouldn't break if you disable CSS - just look worse. The text should still be perfectly readable and images viewable.

That's an unreasonable expectation. Many websites have complex content and layouts, and no web designer will build their site to gracefully fall back with CSS disabled. That just doesn't happen.

Re: A day without JavaScript

#399

Post by kalleboo »

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…

One problem is that more and more, people expect the browsing experience to include a lot of responsive features that require a bunch of client-side JavaScript.

Except JavaScript blows, the emerging JS extension ecosystem that tries to fix that is still highly in flux (and mostly blows), so developers try to keep their server-side stuff NOT JavaScript, and then supporting server-side rendering means re-implementing everything twice.

Of course, this doesn't excuse document-centric sites like news and blogs.

Re: A day without JavaScript

#400

Post by madjam002 »

RussianCow wrote: post #317
madjam002 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use Redux and React server side rendering, you can quite easily wrap forms/interactions on your page with a tag and a hidden input with the Redux action name, and then handle the actions/reducers on the server. I've played around with it in the past and managed to convert a SPA which was using redux-form heavily to work fully without Javascript enabled, and it was only like ~200sloc.

I wouldn't say it's "quite easily" done. The most obvious challenge is components that depend on data loaded asynchronously: If the only thing the component renders is a "loading" message while it fetches something from an API, that's all that the server is going to render as well. So you have to figure out a way to render asynchronously on the server-side, and then you also have to come up with a generic way to hand…

Agreed, but the overhead of coming up with "generic" ways to handle all of these interactive features like data fetching, redirects, etc, isn't that big (at least from what I've experienced).

It's good to have a standardised way of doing all of those things anyway, and when you do, you can make sure they all work on the server.

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