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Your website should work without JavaScript (2021)

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Re: Your website should work without JavaScript (2021)

#81

Post by capitainenemo »

cercatrova wrote: post #79
capitainenemo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

95% of the functionality web apps I've been put in charge of building works without JavaScript. You do lose things like form validation, and some of the links to things like detail forms opens in the same window instead. Or, say, a master/detail selection having a full list of hundreds of items instead of 90% of them hidden based on It's useful for most of the reasons listed in the parent article. You can also do qui…

HTML and CSS have form validation too. You can do something like :has(:valid) when you add in your validation schema in the HTML.

Yep! Regrettably the issue I had was getting JS and HTML5 form validation to work nicely together. The issue was that the HTML5 validation was triggering before the onsubmit which was when we were reviewing the entire form for consistency. So even though we played around with it, and in some places used it for "required" it just didn't work out too well with a lot of the ways we were validating forms. I'm sure we could have made it work - turning on and off the HTML5 validation as needed, using an onclick or some other event instead, but it was easier to just let the non-JS version be validated server-side (which we obviously do as well, as any sane dev would).

I am a fan of the HTML5 validation though - offered feedback when they were working on it that I think made it into the spec like interaction of required and hidden elements...

And, I suspect for most of our forms the simple patterns of HTML5 validation would be fine, it's just that sometimes it wasn't, and it was easier to be consistent in how validation worked and looked... So. Chalk it up to laziness. So long as the forms still worked we decided to let it be.

Re: Your website should work without JavaScript (2021)

#82

Post by cercatrova »

chrismorgan wrote: post #24
encryptluks2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that is what new frameworks are doing.

There are situations where JavaScript is being replaced with WebAssembly. There are absolutely no situations where serialised HTML is being replaced with WebAssembly.

Flutter web is one of them. It displays on a canvas element.

In the future with WASM, I expect the same thing, a Rust web app that also displays on a canvas for example.

Re: Your website should work without JavaScript (2021)

#83

Post by [deleted] »

ravenstine wrote: post #40

I don't care so much when a site with lots of interactivity requires JavaScript, but holy heck, do few things piss me off more than a blog site with articles that require JavaScript just to read text! Whomever writes web software to do that should be ashamed of themselves. If it's really that hard for you to prerender a page on the server, then just send the text by itself. Can you do that? I don't need you to preren…

[deleted]

Re: Your website should work without JavaScript (2021)

#84

Post by cercatrova »

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 playing around with Three.js and it's been incredible the types of 3D art you can create. I want to make those experiences for users which is simply impossible without JS.

However, I will also say that most of the websites I do make will work without JS because I use Next.js as a server rendering framework, plus CSS can handle a lot of things these days, such as modals, link trees, etc that used to require JS and I use those where possible.

What I will not do though is re-implement logic just for JS disablers. 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. Even the 1% figure is misleading for production apps if you use TypeScript (to prevent JS breakage) or modern dev practices like distributed CDNs (to prevent a package from getting loaded).

Re: Your website should work without JavaScript (2021)

#85

Post by ksbrooksjr »

dijit wrote: post #42
chrismorgan wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No browser supports DASH any more; Edge 12–18 did, but that was lost in the Chromium shift. (Source: https://caniuse.com/mpeg-dash .) But HLS has wide support on mobile browsers, and on desktop Safari. (Source: https://caniuse.com/http-live-streaming .) So YouTube should in theory be able to support JavaScript-free playback for many of its users.

Whups! Thanks for pointing that out! Do you think that difference would materially affect whether YouTube or Netflix could exist as a website in a meaningful way without JavaScript? By meaningful: would it fulfil its core competence of finding videos and streaming them to the browser?

One feature that's kind of difficult to emulate without Javascript is the ability to play media continuously while navigating with the back and forward buttons. Rich Harris talked about this at the 5 minute mark of his video on whether or not SPAs have ruined the web [1].

Youtube actually uses this capability specifically. If you add a Youtube video to a queue, it switches to a picture in picture mode where you can navigate while the video is still playing.

The only other technical challenge is handling animations between route changes. There's a browser api in progress (the shared element transition API) [2], that will allow animations during navigations without client side routing, but it still requires Javascript. Navigation animations are arguably just purely aesthetic though.

[1] https://youtu.be/860d8usGC0o?t=299

[2] https://developer.chrome.com/blog/shared-element-transitions...

Re: Your website should work without JavaScript (2021)

#86

Post by verisimilitudes »

I go further than handwritten HTML and CSS. I also have a Gopher hole. The only advantage a browser such as Emacs' eww has over an Emacs Gopher client is that eww is included by default. It also leads to good practices such as avoiding superfluous images and styling. Another advantage is the relatively small set of people using Gopher, meaning people who use it are more likely to reach out or similar things, like the older Internet.

Re: Your website should work without JavaScript (2021)

#87

Post by deworms »

giantrobot wrote: post #73
deworms wrote: post #61

Purists who refuse to load websites with JS are such a small percentage of visitors they can be safely ignored. It's an uphill battle that they're losing very fast. I don't think you can use more than 5% of websites without JS in any capacity. The whole point of websites is lost if they can't track visitors, see what they're paying attention to, and how to manipulate their behavior. Everyone's doing it, and if you do…

> Purists who refuse to load websites with JS are such a small percentage of visitors they can be safely ignored. Except they are not[0]. Besides micro browsers there's screen readers that can't even use sites that customize a bunch of div elements with no accessibility tags. [0] https://24ways.org/2019/microbrowsers-are-everywhere/

For most commercial purposes screen readers can be safely ignored, they are not used by big spenders. Social share cards can be previewed readily and easily prepared without impacting the main content of the website.

Re: Your website should work without JavaScript (2021)

#88

Post by oblak »

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 am a js disabler who writes js for a living. "Apps" are hard without js. Not worth it and I do not expect anything complex or interactive to work. Stuff like HN and news/forums function just fine without, though. And that is great.

Re: Your website should work without JavaScript (2021)

#89

Post by masswerk »

cercatrova wrote: post #82
chrismorgan wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are situations where JavaScript is being replaced with WebAssembly. There are absolutely no situations where serialised HTML is being replaced with WebAssembly.

Flutter web is one of them. It displays on a canvas element. In the future with WASM, I expect the same thing, a Rust web app that also displays on a canvas for example.

How are you going to address accessibility when rendering everything on a canvas element? What are search engines going to scrape?

Re: Your website should work without JavaScript (2021)

#90

Post by 2b3a51 »

TimPC wrote: post #58

Why you should double your workload in designing a website to support 2 in 1000 users. By said no PM ever.

Commercial site, personal blog, social media &c yes, of course, you are right

Sites people use to access vital services: you should be designing Web sites that will work on old broken devices on slow connections. 2‰ of 30 million is 60 000, a stadium full.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiven...

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