Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off • Hacker News Board

Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

#71

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, May 08, 2018, 3:24 PM UTC

reificator wrote: post #69

Androider wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does make development easier, and at some point it just doesn't make sense to support any longer. If the number of people who visit your site with JavaScript disabled is less than the number of people who visit using the Opera browser, does it really make sense to add [number of supported browsers] x [JS on | JS off] permutations to your testing workload? Is spending the time and resources on creating a non-JS sit…

> If the number of people who visit your site with JavaScript disabled is less than the number of people who visit using the Opera browser, does it really make sense to add [number of supported browsers] x [JS on | JS off] permutations to your testing workload? If your site doesn't work for people with JS disabled, you're unlikely to see significant traffic from people with JS disabled.

Also, if you use JavaScript trackers instead of server logs, guess which group won't show on those trackers at all...

Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

#72

Post by jrvidal » Tue, May 08, 2018, 3:24 PM UTC

zeveb wrote: post #41

staticelf wrote: post #2

I like that he offers solutions but honestly, more people are vision impaired than have javascript disabled so instead of doing all that work instead put it first on helping people with disabilities. > There is a danger that more and more sites will require JavaScript to render any content at all. What danger, exactly? While some sites that don't require a lot of js is nice you will soon notice that many sites you wa…

> I personally think that WebAssembly is the future so the web will finally just be another compilation target and I can't wait for it to be wide spread. I really hope not. I don't believe we've seen the last of exploits like Spectre & Meltdown. Allowing anyone in the world to execute code on the same machine whose memory contains your bank accounts, your private memos, your passwords &c. will, I hope, come to be see…

I think your fears are a bit misguided. WebAssembly runs within the same sandbox as JavaScript code. I don't see how this would constitute a _higher_ security risk than browsers as they stand today.

Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

#73

Post by plopz » Tue, May 08, 2018, 3:29 PM UTC

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #58

gear54rus wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English obviously. It is quite far fetched, but I'm just tired of seeing countless hours wasted because the numbers aren't localized properly or RTL breaks layout. It's superfluous, people should have their native tongue and should learn English as means of international communication. Also imagine encoding problems which are also great PITA going away with ascii-only technologies.

With the way the population is going we’re more likely to use mandarin or Hindi as an international language.

Mandarin has the most first language speakers, but English is far ahead for second language speakers.

Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

#74

Post by gear54rus » Tue, May 08, 2018, 3:29 PM UTC

always_good wrote: post #70

gear54rus wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English obviously. It is quite far fetched, but I'm just tired of seeing countless hours wasted because the numbers aren't localized properly or RTL breaks layout. It's superfluous, people should have their native tongue and should learn English as means of international communication. Also imagine encoding problems which are also great PITA going away with ascii-only technologies.

This is some of the most self-centered reasoning I've seen on HN. Everyone should learn English to reduce your workload. It's almost a caricature of the stereotypical redneck who has never left the country and gets mad when they overhear someone speaking Spanish at Fiesta, muttering "but this is America " under their breath.

Everyone should learn English to reduce everyone's workload. I had to learn it just like anyone else who understands the need and is not a native speaker.

Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

#75

Post by CodeTheInternet » Tue, May 08, 2018, 3:29 PM UTC

I'm glad he can code his brochureware site with minimal impact when JS is disabled. It is 2018 and every site is driven by JS, not just DOM events. If you disable JS, you know what you're getting into. Do we need to develop for those that decide to block CSS? Insist on deprecated browsers? You develop for your audience.

Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

#76

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, May 08, 2018, 3:29 PM UTC

SquareWheel wrote: post #66

realusername wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Back in 2006/7 I remember we'd use "progressive enhancement" to make a site work without JavaScript and then add JavaScript enhancements for those who had JS enabled. I still do that on my case, a good 95% of the features I develop work without Javascript. One additional benefit is that if your JS crash for any reason, most of the things are still working.

I've never even heard of Javascript "crashing". Is that a thing that happens?

I've seen it plenty of times. Something triggers a JS execution bug that breaks the entire script. Suddenly, the site is dead. If you're lucky, it might start working after reload. If not, you'll have to wait until developers figure out something is wrong.

Causes vary. Sometimes it's a resource that fails to load. Sometimes it's a race condition. Sometimes, it's just dumb coding[0]. The more JS is put on site, and the more the site depends on it, the more likely it is to happen.

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[0] - Like one of the large food order sites in my country that won't let you submit a form if it contains a number in the comment box - the very comment box you're supposed to use to add details like floor number. The problem persisted for the last couple times I used them (in a space of several weeks), so I wonder if they even realized they have a problem and are losing business because people see the checkout form broken without explanation, and order elsewhere.

Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

#77

Post by icebraining » Tue, May 08, 2018, 3:30 PM UTC

cptskippy wrote: post #53

bitwize wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iron law of Web development: You develop your site for tge platform that has 95% of your user base, and tell the other 5% to join the 21st century because supporting them is not worth the cost. Back in the early 2000s, this meant you had to check your site in IE. Stragglers still using Netscape could pound sand.

Actually we use to tout Graceful Degradation back in those day. Most sites were either static, rendering information from a DB, capturing simple form input, or a combination of the three. AJAX wasn't a thing and the concept of Web Apps didn't exist. If you were checking user agents then chances are you were doing something stupid or lazy.

Yet "Best Viewed With Internet Explorer/Netscape" was common back then.

Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

#78

Post by parvenu74 » Tue, May 08, 2018, 3:31 PM UTC

When the statistical body of internet users who refuse to use JavaScrpit are expressed in terms of a market to whom custom (JS-free) experiences will induce them to pay money for products and services we'll begin to see businesses create JS-free experiences for them.

Are there marketing-specific attributes of anti-JS web users?

Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

#79

Post by TuringTest » Tue, May 08, 2018, 3:35 PM UTC

acomjean wrote: post #17

everdev wrote: post #8

Back in 2006/7 I remember we'd use "progressive enhancement" to make a site work without JavaScript and then add JavaScript enhancements for those who had JS enabled. At some point (maybe after the popularity of Google Maps?) nobody wanted progressive enhancement and it was totally cool to just ignore users who had JS turned off. It made web app development so much easier, but probably less user friendly. It feels li…

I thought progressive enhancement. I think people expect much more interactivity now, (I think google maps was a driver and web based email as well), so it became harder to do pure back end. For example a lot of the queries I run now show a dynamically generated graph. I can do that on the back end, but much easier to use a javascript charting package. I guess I could just use javascript all the way down

If your page consist solely on a dynamically generated graph, it's OK for it to not show anything with JS disabled.

If you have other content though, it's not OK to not show anything; only the graph should be missing without javascript, the rest of the page should still render.

Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

#80

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, May 08, 2018, 3:35 PM UTC

always_good wrote: post #70

gear54rus wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English obviously. It is quite far fetched, but I'm just tired of seeing countless hours wasted because the numbers aren't localized properly or RTL breaks layout. It's superfluous, people should have their native tongue and should learn English as means of international communication. Also imagine encoding problems which are also great PITA going away with ascii-only technologies.

This is some of the most self-centered reasoning I've seen on HN. Everyone should learn English to reduce your workload. It's almost a caricature of the stereotypical redneck who has never left the country and gets mad when they overhear someone speaking Spanish at Fiesta, muttering "but this is America " under their breath.

Maybe some see it as self-centered, but I find it resonates with me strongly. Now that we're a global civilization, life would be much simpler of global-scale things get standardized. Like, if metric system was adopted everywhere. If people used ISO 8601[0] instead of whatever is their random way of writing time down. If people used one well-defined number format. Etc.

IMO what's really being self-centered is - when dealing with international things like the Internet - to insist on making everyone else's life harder for the sake of whatever random local tradition you grew up with.

And I say that as European with plenty of weird localized ways of writing dates, numbers, currencies, etc. Ways which I abandoned pretty much as soon as I got exposed to computing.

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[0] - https://xkcd.com/1179/