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Using the Web for a Day with JavaScript Turned Off

smashingmagazine.com

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

#41

Post by zeveb »

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 seen as riskier & riskier as time goes on.

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

#42

Post by shabbyrobe »

jakecopp wrote: post #35
shabbyrobe wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How does uMatrix compare to uBlock Origin with its matrix enabled through advanced mode? I can't tell much difference but would be willing to jump ship. uBlock Origin doesn't have CSS or image control per domain but it's the JS I worry about!

They complement each other. I use them both. uBlock origin has my back for those rare times where I get the shits and just disable uMatrix entirely for a particular site.

Decentraleyes is also worth a look if privacy concerns form a part of your aversion to the blizzard of garbage your browser spews forth at you. It contains in-browser hosted copies of all that CDN JS junk, so if you have to turn on JS for some shared copy of jQuery that Decentraleyes happens to have bundled, you don't hit the network at all.

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

#43

Post by romaniv »

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…

>It made web app development so much easier

I aim to develop web UIs using (mostly) progressive enhancement. I adopted several practices and developed some libraries supporting this process. As a result:

1. When I need to create something, I know exactly which data structures to use. This is determined by what is available in modern browsers.

2. I can quickly prototype solutions using plain HTML focusing on logic rather than style.

3. Since my data is by definition contained in HTML, I can easily query it using CSS queries. This makes working with nested data a breeze.

4. I factored code I reuse into generic, self-contained behaviors. Things like "when this form is invalid, this control should be inactive". There is usually very little to none page-specific code.

5. Once a behavior is written and tested, "debugging" usually involves simply making sure the page has the right attributes. I can do this by running a CSS query in console or looking at DOM. No breakpoints, no stepping, no watches.

6. The most important part: I can add one behavior at a time and the result is something that works and makes sense.

7. A lot of UI "logic" I used to have in scripts naturally migrated to CSS.

I like this process way more than fiddling with tons of page-specific "glue" JavaScript. I especially like it when I'm in a crunch, because it pre-defines a lot of the things I would have to "design" on the fly in a traditional development workflow. Also, if I run out of time I have a working (if ugly) app. If I introduce a bug somewhere in UI or run into a compatibility issues, it usually doesn't result in the entire user workflow stopping dead.

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

#44

Post by ocfx »

zeveb wrote: post #37
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…

> It does make development easier, and at some point it just doesn't make sense to support any longer. It depends on what you're doing. If you're building an app (something which would make more sense as a native program anyway), then sure — use JavaScript. But if you're displaying text and images, then HTML & CSS are perfectly capable of handling that. In general, I think that a good content-focused website will wor…

Such a small minority use lynx or links, why even bring it up, they don't matter. A business isn't going to spend money so their app renders properly in a text based web client that nobody will access their site with.

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

#45

Post by TeMPOraL »

brightball wrote: post #26
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 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.

> It’s so rare that I actually run into an SPA that doesn’t feel slow...I just wonder why people bother sometimes.

It's fashion over function on the business side, and CV-driven development on the frontend people's side.

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

#46

Post by moistoreos »

ibdf wrote: post #39

Oh my lord, this article is non-sense. Had you gone to a website and had not been able to read anything I would say... good point. But you went to a Wordpress admin to prove your point. Lord have mercy... you're really going to hate your experience once WP switches to a JS based editor. Quick, let's try using Facebook and other apps built on JS frameworks and complain about the functionality not working. Let's try se…

Cue web assembly advocates.

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

#48

Post by gear54rus »

mattmanser wrote: post #40
gear54rus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 infe…

What do you mean about dropping i18n? How can we drop that, force everyone to speak Esperanto?

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.

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

#49

Post by pjmlp »

romaniv wrote: post #43
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…

>It made web app development so much easier I aim to develop web UIs using (mostly) progressive enhancement. I adopted several practices and developed some libraries supporting this process. As a result: 1. When I need to create something, I know exactly which data structures to use. This is determined by what is available in modern browsers. 2. I can quickly prototype solutions using plain HTML focusing on logic rat…

This is also my approach, when I am allowed to set the rules.

Server side rendering with vanilaJS for the snippets that actually matter.

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

#50

Post by pishpash »

zeveb wrote: post #37
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…

> It does make development easier, and at some point it just doesn't make sense to support any longer. It depends on what you're doing. If you're building an app (something which would make more sense as a native program anyway), then sure — use JavaScript. But if you're displaying text and images, then HTML & CSS are perfectly capable of handling that. In general, I think that a good content-focused website will wor…

Worse, some sites don't even work for pdf-print any more.
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