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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

#51

Post by pjmlp »

gear54rus wrote: post #48
mattmanser wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good luck with that.

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

#52

Post by pjmlp »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #33
reitanqild wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Seconded. Actual users have little demand. Especially non-tech users. They just take what devs give them. Frontend stuff seems mostly fashion-driven these days, with designers copying other designers. I can't imagine any user actually asking for hero images, hamburger menus, floating headers/footers, webfonts, or making JS required to render article text.

It is not without its own set of quirks, but native frontend is surely much more sane.

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

#53

Post by cptskippy »

bitwize wrote: post #27
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…

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.

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

#54

Post by pjmlp »

bitwize wrote: post #27
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…

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.

Nowadays Chrome replaced IE.

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

#55

Post by shabbyrobe »

ams6110 wrote: post #32
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…

I tried uMatrix, and uBlock Origin advanced mode, but after a while I decided it was too much fiddling. I'm back to using uBlock in default config, along with an /etc/hosts file.

Yeah I agree it is really fiddly. I totally understand why people say "to hell with it". I only really put up with it in the first place because I was trapped with a woefully underpowered computer for a lot longer than I should've been. But I found the fiddling got easier and easier with time. I've stuck with it for over 2 years now and it's really just not something I notice any more.

Actually, when I get stuck on a different computer and I'm forced to use the same terrible internet everyone else has to use these days, I catch myself clicking around where my uMatrix icon would normally be and it takes me a few seconds of dawning horror to realise that I've totally lost control of my experience.

"No thank you, the latest celebrity diet fad isn't really my cup of tea." "What? Where is this autoplaying video hiding?? Must be under one of these neo-popup JS disasters." "No, I'm not interested in 17 ways that my imperfect sleep is going to kill me right this instant." "NO I don't want to download Bonzi Buddy."

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

#56

Post by amiga-workbench »

nabla9 wrote: post #22

http://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.

Bring back gopher, then there's no way these script kiddies can muck up the web.

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

#57

Post by stepvhen »

i want to invite others to try to visit Yelp on mobile with JS turned off. first off, you canr access anything. then the website provides nonsense reasons for why a user should have js turned on, and tries to guilt the user into doing do.

i always have js off by default, and turn it on momentarily when i feel it necessary. i do not feel it necessary for yelp.

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

#58

Post by SolaceQuantum »

gear54rus wrote: post #48
mattmanser wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#59

Post by scaryclam »

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…

You sir (or ma'am), are a credit to modern web developers :) I love that you're using PE as a development tool and not just doing it because it's a good way to build robust websites and applications. I may have to try and sell your reasoned approach to some of my colleagues (they're not PE averse, but don't always see it as a great benefit).

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

#60

Post by cptskippy »

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 remember when we used the term "Graceful Degradation".

It really isn't that hard to design a functional HTML site and then layer Javascript and AJAX over top of it to enhance the experience. There are very few sites that actually need to be using Frameworks like Angular and React.

Sometimes I wonder if most developers would even be able to design a functional site using only HTML. It seems like most don't know the difference between a button and an anchor.

With modern server side frameworks it's even easier to support graceful degradation or progressive enhancement as the frameworks will handle the accept header processing for you.

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