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Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript

#61

Post by ezekg »

SushiHippie wrote: post #23

My gripe with them switching to SPA (or whatever they changed in the last few weeks/months) is that viewing files got really jarring and I always switch to the raw view. Searching through a file is really bad with their lazy loading and scrolling horizontally on Firefox on Android is near impossible. And sometimes hitting the browser back button won't switch the page.

I've been dealing with this ever since the beta. Reviewing PRs on mobile is really, really frustrating. I almost feel like they're trying to push us into their mobile apps a la Reddit.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript

#63

Post by jackcviers3 »

Yep. Can't read readmes from the emacs eww browser anymore or browse individual code listings. This is ridiculous. I get it for their code editor, but it should at least SHOW the code and line numbers and allow text search via form submission like it used to from text-only browsers.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript

#64

Post by mherkender »

warkanlock wrote: post #3

Honest question and no pun intended: I don't understand people's desire to prevent JavaScript from being a language that runs in the browser. Could someone shed some light on this?

JavaScript is fairly slow due to technical constraints. It interrupts the rendering of the page both through increased network traffic and while it is executing.

It's usually better to avoid it unless necessary, but many web developers overengineer their pages with JavaScript to the point where it's a problem.

At their core, web pages are documents not apps.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript

#65

Post by jackcviers3 »

warkanlock wrote: post #3

Honest question and no pun intended: I don't understand people's desire to prevent JavaScript from being a language that runs in the browser. Could someone shed some light on this?

I don't want to leave my editor to read an HTML page that has content that does not require javascript to display. I have no problem with js in a full-on web-browser, but up until 4 hours ago, Github displayed readmes and code listings without the need for javascript, so I could run it in the editor's web browser, which doesn't have a js engine.

I can do that via more complicated emacs web browsers that essentially render chrome in a buffer. But I shouldn't have to for things that are only text in the first place.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript

#67

Post by tpmoney »

abricq wrote: post #32
Argonaut998 wrote: post #10

At the end of the day GitHub is a web app. I don’t think it’s worth complaining about unless it’s something like Wikipedia that stops working.

For sure as of today GitHub is a web app, but it's questionable whether it should forces you to use it as one. In essence, GitHub is just a remote server for a .git folder. This does not need any JS. I see that GitHub now tries to become at the same time a social media for hacker-friendly people and some sort of super-CI server with automation. For sure these are good features. However I also see why people are sad t…

While I can understand the annoyance at the change, if your perspective is that GitHub is just a server for a .git directory then why even bother with accessing it via a web browser in the first place. The git cli seems like it should be both more than sufficient in that case and preferable since it’s much less resource intensive and designed for the purpose.

For sure there is a discussion to be had about whether the addons that GitHub provides over and above being a server for a .git directory need JavaScript, but that feels like a different discussion than “it’s just a server for .git directories”

Re: Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript

#69

Post by rasz »

warkanlock wrote: post #3

Honest question and no pun intended: I don't understand people's desire to prevent JavaScript from being a language that runs in the browser. Could someone shed some light on this?

Check performance gap between old HTML Gmail (20KB of pure pre formatted html) if you still can (being depreciated this January) and the new javascript one (over 1MB of js/json to be processed and slowly rendered one div at a time client side).

Re: Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript

#70

Post by eadmund »

warkanlock wrote: post #3

Honest question and no pun intended: I don't understand people's desire to prevent JavaScript from being a language that runs in the browser. Could someone shed some light on this?

From my point of view, there are several of reasons:

• It’s just not necessary. The Web is, at its heart, about resources and actions on them. Those resources are mostly documents. There is just no need to execute a Turing-complete programming language in order to display a list of links to files (which is what GitHub is).

• It hinders use of lightweight browsers. There is no good reason that I should be forced to fire up a VM like Firefox or Chrome when I could use eww, w3m or elinks.

• It is insecure. Javascript enables insecure exploits. Large browsers such as Firefox and Chrome have a much larger surface area than small HTML viewers such as eww, w3m or elinks.

• It hinders privacy. Javascript and large browsers enable much more persistent user tracking than lightweight browsers such as eww, w3m or elinks.

For me, the first reason is the strongest: I think that those who push Javascript fundamentally misunderstand the Web. I am grudgingly fine with using it to provide functionality which would be impossible without it, but I also think that experiments such as htmx show a way forward to put more behaviour into the browser itself. Browser apps are certainly neat! But the Web is ultimately about linked documents. It is built on the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol and the Hyper Text Markup Language, not the Network App Protocol and the Network App Programming Paradigm for Inexperienced Engineering Students (although I do sometimes think Javascript proponents just need a nap and to have their nappies changed grin).

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