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Your website should work without JavaScript (2021)

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Re: Your website should work without JavaScript (2021)

#151

Post by sylware »

justusw wrote: post #136
sylware wrote: post #99

The real pertinent reason to regulate and to get noscript/basic (x)html web portals (at least on "critical" online services) is that "javascript" requires a grotesquely and absurdely massive and complex web engine, including its SDK. The only web engines today are blink/geeko, financed by google(vanguard/blackrock), and webkit financed by apple(vanguard/blackrock). They are all written using c++ which has also a grot…

As far as I understand, Gecko and Blink are completely separate, and if we were to put things together with slashes, Chrome/Edge/Opera (Blink) and then Safari (WebKit) share the same lineage (and even Konqueror!). Firefox/Gecko come from a very different direction. To call out investors behind commercial project fails to acknowledge the rich OSS history behind the browser engines. By no means I intend to disregard th…

I don't believe in that much incompetence at this level. I believe the current landscape of "web engines" is mostly steered by the people of "vanguard/blackrock" (apple/vanguard/microsoft/etc) and that they know they have a monopoly over the web and they are trying to blur this landscape to avoid regulation. This is so accute, I am seeing toxic malice for the humanity now and nothing else.

Re: Your website should work without JavaScript (2021)

#152

Post by encryptluks2 »

chrismorgan wrote: post #57
encryptluks2 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it all the time. Tons of sites out there are replacing standard HTML with JS and won't even work without JS.

I said nothing about replacing HTML with JavaScript.

That is what these frameworks will do.

Re: Your website should work without JavaScript (2021)

#153

Post by whakim »

robalni wrote: post #144
whakim wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I understand (and respect) the argument that you only want to run code that you can vet and easily modify. But I don't think most people feel that way - I think most people expect that they're getting some service (like a browser) by allowing developers to execute arbitrary code they've built on their device. I therefore don't think javascript is abusive in the way you describe it, because it follows the para…

> I guess I understand (and respect) the argument that you only want to run code that you can vet and easily modify This is not about me. It doesn't matter what most people feel or what they want to do. It's the situation where people are expected to run often invisible code written by untrustable people that is wrong. People should have the right to know and control what their computer is doing, even if they don't w…

This is purely about your preferences. You're arguing for a world in which the vast majority of people give up something they really like in exchange for something they really don't care about. "Abusive" is quite literally the wrong term because the exchange (you run arbitrary code on my device, I get software I want to use) is helpful to most people, not harmful.

Re: Your website should work without JavaScript (2021)

#154

Post by robalni »

whakim wrote: post #153
robalni wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guess I understand (and respect) the argument that you only want to run code that you can vet and easily modify This is not about me. It doesn't matter what most people feel or what they want to do. It's the situation where people are expected to run often invisible code written by untrustable people that is wrong. People should have the right to know and control what their computer is doing, even if they don't w…

This is purely about your preferences. You're arguing for a world in which the vast majority of people give up something they really like in exchange for something they really don't care about. "Abusive" is quite literally the wrong term because the exchange (you run arbitrary code on my device, I get software I want to use) is helpful to most people, not harmful.

> the vast majority of people give up something they really like

I don't know what you mean that people like exactly but it's definitely possible to let people use software in fair ways so they don't have to give up anything. A lot of times the use of javascript is unnecessary so removing it doesn't make any difference for the user.

> the exchange (you run arbitrary code on my device, I get software I want to use) is helpful to most people, not harmful

It doesn't matter that the exchange is helpful if it happens in an unfair way. Compare this to prostitution. It's illegal (at least the other side of it) in many countries. But everyone involved gets what they want or need and the exchange is helpful to everyone, so why is it illegal? I guess it's because some people just think it's wrong and that it's an exchange that can't happen in a fair way even if everyone involved is happy with it.

Re: Your website should work without JavaScript (2021)

#155

Post by AkshatJ27 »

robalni wrote: post #107
cercatrova wrote: post #84

I used to think this. I even used uMatrix (RIP) to disable all JS. After a while though, it simply wasn't worth it. You'll have a vocal minority on HN of JS disablers, but the truth is most people don't know or care about JavaScript, much less want to disable it. So, it's really not worth catering to this 0.2% or even 1% of people as the article cites. There are just too many interesting things JS can do. I've been p…

I don't care how many people there are that care about whether they are running javascript. The problem persists even if 0 people care about it. The problem is that people are getting abused, even if they don't care about it. They are unknowingly lending their computers to unknown people who use them as their tools by running code on them. My computer is my tool and nobody else's. If website owners think it's totally…

This reads like satire.

Re: Your website should work without JavaScript (2021)

#156

Post by [deleted] »

yellowapple wrote: post #138
cercatrova wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A particular example is using an animation library like Framer Motion that works with JS. It is somewhat possible to achieve similar effects in CSS, creating your own spring function in SCSS for example, to interpolate between values, but I'm not going to do that because it's effectively double the work for 1% of the users. > > Doing only the JS version means you spend the same engineering effort but it doesn't wor…

> Where did I say it would be the same engineering effort? Saying "double the work" implies the doubling to be total - i.e. the Framer Motion approach and the SCSS approach are each 100%, and doing both would therefore be 200% or double. What you're saying now would be more accurately described as "triple the work" - i.e. Framer Motion would be 100%, SCSS would be double that (200%), and the total would be 300% or tr…

[deleted]

Re: Your website should work without JavaScript (2021)

#157

Post by Tajnymag »

pyuser583 wrote: post #137
cercatrova wrote: post #84

I used to think this. I even used uMatrix (RIP) to disable all JS. After a while though, it simply wasn't worth it. You'll have a vocal minority on HN of JS disablers, but the truth is most people don't know or care about JavaScript, much less want to disable it. So, it's really not worth catering to this 0.2% or even 1% of people as the article cites. There are just too many interesting things JS can do. I've been p…

I have a medical disorder which could one day render me blind. I worry about how much of the web I will be able to use. Don’t JS free web pages have better accessibility?

As long as the underlying DOM uses the correct semantics, there shouldn't really be a great difference. One can write a static page that would be less accessible than a js heavy alternative. Screen readers nowadays work with the rendered page DOM, not the raw html.

Re: Your website should work without JavaScript (2021)

#158

Post by c-cube »

sylware wrote: post #150
c-cube wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quickjs exists, and serenity OS' browser (ladybird) show that js engines, and js-able browsers, are doable by developers outside giant corporations.

ladybird is c++ and I was carefull to include the issue of c++ too. Depending on the grotesque and absurd c++ syntax complexity which make any c++ compiler, even naive, out of reach for any real-life and reasonably-sized alternative is a mistake on the same level than the current web engines. I said "double the pain". It would have been much more interesting to have ladybird written in plain and simple C (with the ri…

> It would have been much more interesting to have ladybird written in plain and simple C (with the right compile-time and runtime function tables and NOT compiling with only gcc or clang). Maybe it is not too late to fix that.

Quite the opposite. The serenityOS people are implementing their own programming language, [jakt](https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt), which currently compiles to C++, and they'll move the codebase progressively to it as they go. I personally doubt that the project could have moved so fast in just a few years if it had been using C instead of C++.

Re: Your website should work without JavaScript (2021)

#159

Post by sylware »

c-cube wrote: post #158
sylware wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ladybird is c++ and I was carefull to include the issue of c++ too. Depending on the grotesque and absurd c++ syntax complexity which make any c++ compiler, even naive, out of reach for any real-life and reasonably-sized alternative is a mistake on the same level than the current web engines. I said "double the pain". It would have been much more interesting to have ladybird written in plain and simple C (with the ri…

> It would have been much more interesting to have ladybird written in plain and simple C (with the right compile-time and runtime function tables and NOT compiling with only gcc or clang). Maybe it is not too late to fix that. Quite the opposite. The serenityOS people are implementing their own programming language, [jakt]( https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt ), which currently compiles to C++, and they'll move the c…

I remember now, I did have a look at that.

I guess if they don't make jakt another c++ (ultra complex syntax), and do manage to have a jakt compiler to machine code, maybe they will beat rust and its servo web engine.

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