The web works much better without JS, sites load faster and browser takes less memory. But sadly many sites use preloaders or plugins that hide entire page content until JS is loaded. What an awful idea.
Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off
21–30 of 180 posts
Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off
#22http://lite.cnn.io/en
Every site should have a plain html option. Or create their html so that it works fine without js or cnn.
Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off
#23Install uBlock Origin and do it every day! I block all JavaScript, then re enable it when needed to fix a site. Often I just need to enable 1st party scripts in the uBlock Origin grid to fix it. Make sure you enable advanced mode to see the grid.
If you're serious about giving this a whirl, uMatrix is even better for fine-grained control. I disable everything except first-party images and CSS by default and it's like a whole new internet.
There's a bit of a dance you have to get used to when things don't work, but I've got it into muscle memory now so I don't even think about it. I tend to click around in there enabling the first few obvious things for about 3 seconds, which works 95% of the time, and for the the remaining 5% the URL gets copy-pasted into Chromium.
Wait, what are all these floating obstructions? I thought I disabled all JS... hang on, you mean CSS is now full of animations and distractions too? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unstickall/ and https://github.com/gagarine/no-transition.
What's that? Sticky sidebar full of chum? No problem - uBlock Origin's "right click, block element" to the rescue.
The internet doesn't have to be shit any more!
Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off
#24Back 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…
You are correct that it is simply not worth it. It was not worth it and we dropped it thankfully. Hopefully we can drop stuff like internationalization with all its wasted effort soon as well.
Regarding JS, I hate its overusage as much as the next guy, but it is in no way a reason to block it all. Nobody is going to waste time to develop for inferior platform (web without JS logic) just so you alone could see an inferior version of the website. Just ignore shitty sites or identify them and block JS on them instead.
Also saying it's just for page reload is simply wrong. When I don't want to download Skype or Discord, I go to the website and they work. Will they work without JS? Will for example dynamic content rendering when I write a comment work? Will P2P file transfers and calls work? JS is used to make web site experience drastically better by good developers, we should strive to be those better developers instead of going back to dark ages of text-only web.
This movement to get rid of JS because there are idiots out there who have the audacity to show the banner that is 3/4 of a screen is frankly just dumb. Why are you trying to ban the tool when it's misused? The web gods gave you the ability to block only the parts of the page or parts of JS you don't want. Use it!
Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off
#25Back 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
> I think people expect much more interactivity now,
This keeps coming up.
Personally I keep thinking that devs and cv-driven development might be to blame as I rarely hear any customer demand anything that demands a frontend framework for their web sites (now web apps, that's another story).
Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off
#26Back 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…
> 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 continue to do it as well. Web frameworks make it so easy it’s hard to justify not doing it.
There are so few web apps that actually need the SPA treatment. It’s a lot simpler to ignore the tool chain headaches that come from committing to the SPA when you don’t need it and gracefully degrade.
It’s so rare that I actually run into an SPA that doesn’t feel slow...I just wonder why people bother sometimes.
Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off
#27Back 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…
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.
Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off
#28Install uBlock Origin and do it every day! I block all JavaScript, then re enable it when needed to fix a site. Often I just need to enable 1st party scripts in the uBlock Origin grid to fix it. Make sure you enable advanced mode to see the grid.
I run uBlock Origin + NoScript. Makes the web run much much faster.
Unfortunately I think Firefox Quantum + uBlock Origin still uses more battery than Chrome...
Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off
#29http://lite.cnn.io/en https://text.npr.org/ Every site should have a plain html option. Or create their html so that it works fine without js or cnn.
I'm trying to assemble a list: https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html but so far there aren't many sites like this that I found useful.
Re: Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off
#30As much as I'd love for the majority of JS to go away, there is no denying the usefulness of AJAX in web forms. Doing page submit is not a better experience for the user or the developer. That's basically the only piece that I can't see going without.