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Some sites require JS because they do weird things like rendering stuff clientside. This site "requires" JS because... The opacity of the article is set to 0?

Some sites require JS because they do weird things like rendering stuff clientside. This site "requires" JS because... The opacity of the article is set to 0? Everything's there, everything's rendered, but they have a CSS rule (".use-motion .post { opacity: 0; }"). Only thing I can think of is that they do a JS fade-in or something and missed the unintended consequences. (Speaking of which... Doesn't Google penalize sites that have an excessive number of hidden keywords? I wonder if the entire article being hidden qualifies...)

johnchristopher 11y ago
When I alt tabbed to the site there was a slow fade-in on the menu.
- TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
  Sidestepping the question of if that actually adds anything to the article - they couldn't be bothered to do the fade-in correctly?
RGamma 11y ago
I find a good way to unfuck those sites is to use something like uMatrix or Web Developer to disable CSS (in uMatrix's case it can't disable inline CSS and needs a page reload, but of course it does a ton of other things and this probably isn't an as important use-case). Also works well when text doesn't properly wrap when the browser window is narrow or when broken menus and bars obscure the content, etc.
- TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
  I find it rather... ironic, shall I say, when CSS actively hurts the readability of a site. This being one of those cases.
  - lemiffe 11y ago
    In what way? I find this website perfectly readable, and the font size and line height were appropriate enough.
    - TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
      I was speaking in the context of with JS disabled. There's a JS-based fade-in on page load (or at least there was; the author mentioned that it'd be changed at some point) that doesn't bother to have a fallback. And as such there's a CSS rule that sets the post opacity to zero (making it unreadable). There are many many many websites that don't work without JS that work if you disable both JS and CSS. This being one of them. That being said, even other than that there are a number of things I don't like about the website. All personal preference, however. (Namely: 85-85-85 font on 255-255-255 background isn't the best, contrast-wise (I have a laptop and am often outside - readability trumps fashion for me); I don't like the trend of narrower and narrower line widths (It looks bad enough on my laptop, on a 2k screen 700px width would just look ridiculous); Ditto, I don't like the trend of higher and higher line heights - 1.2 is plenty, 1.5 is overkill, this site is 1.7; Continuing on the trend of "why do you put so little on the screen", I find the paragraph separation also overkill (1 line between paragraphs or equivalent is fine, and maybe two between sections)))
      - radio4fan 11y ago
        > I don't like the trend of narrower and narrower line widths (It looks bad enough on my laptop, on a 2k screen 700px width would just look ridiculous); The line length (measure) on that page is about 60 ems. This is much longer than the optimal value for readability, which is 30 - 40 ems. > Ditto, I don't like the trend of higher and higher line heights - 1.2 is plenty, 1.5 is overkill, this site is 1.7; As the measure increases, leading (line height) must also increase for legibility, because it's harder to track longer lines with the eye when 'returning' to the start of the next line. A leading of 1.7 ems doesn't seem unreasonable to me for such a long measure. For me, type on the web is a lot better than it used to be: tiny type on ridiculously long lines. There are some holdouts though; Hacker News for example.
nissehulth 11y ago
+1 When I click a link and see no content, most often I close the tab and forget about it. Is it really that hard to display simple content without JS nowadays?
shadowmint 11y ago
oh come on. It's 2015, not 1999. If you don't have javascript enabled, do you honestly expect to be able to read half of the internet?
- cm2187 11y ago
  For privacy and security I do the same. Requiring javascript to just view a blog article is insane.
  - shadowmint 11y ago
    Don't be ridiculous. There's something to be said for supporting accessibility, and I completely endorse that, but if you turn javascript off because you want to, don't complain when you can't read or use a modern website. The web uses javascript. Get used to it.
    - gadrfgaesgysd 11y ago
      "modern website" The text is in plain format in the source file. What does the JS add besides actually showing the text. Nothing. In 1999 the Web had aligned text, fonts, and hyperlinks. In 2015 we need JS to do this!?
      - TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
        Agreed. As I said: it's a trivial fix.
    - mondoshawan 11y ago
      Don't be myopic: accessibility standards do not require JS.
    - wtbob 11y ago
      > There's something to be said for supporting accessibility, and I completely endorse that, but if you turn javascript off because you want to, don't complain when you can't read or use a modern website. > The web uses javascript. Get used to it. There's absolutely no reason to require the execution of potentially malicious code in order to read an article. Yes, web apps require JavaScript (and I don't use very many of them, for precisely that reason), but a web page, that is a resource fetched via HTTP (the hypertext transfer protocol) and encoded in HTML (hypertext markup language), simply doesn't and shouldn't. The Internet is about communication; it's about the exchange of information.
Fiahil 11y ago
Isn't the effect identically achievable using the `transform` css property? Why would anyone use JS in this case?
userbinator 11y ago
I saw this comment before reading the article completely, and thought it was about being expelled for using JS. I wouldn't be surprised if, to someone who knew only HTML, JS looked like "hacking".
TeMPOraL 11y ago
Today's web is ridiculous. It looks like if developers and designers are increasingly becoming a bunch of kids with delusions of grandeur and IQ around 50, living in total denial about reasonableness of their work. Just imagine you're going to the newsstand to buy a newspaper, and instead you get a package containing blank sheets of paper, a microfilm scanner and a roll of microfilm, with instructions telling you to go home, scan the film and print the content yourself. You'd be on fire. You'd write to the publisher, asking them what the fuck they're doing. Even ignoring the additional time and money you'll have to spend printing the newsppaper yourself, it surely must be cheaper to print it all with industrial machines than making an equal amounts of goddamn microfilm and scanners for it! Economies of scale and stuff. And yet this is normal on the web. Prepping content for client-side JS generation takes similar amounts of time (if not more) to just rendering the page on server. And then they have to send a) the content, and b) JS to render it, which takes more space than a rendered page, and then every client has to render it on its own. They're wasting electricity on every goddamn step of the pipeline, from servers through the network to the client. It's like electricity is free so they can all show everyone a giant fuck you, because hey, if it's free then let's waste it all. Ok, I got carried away. But my point still stands. Dear JS-first website maker - I'm not willing to view your ads until you start covering my electricity bills for all the coal that got wasted on your idiotic client-side-rendering contraptions.
- adrusi 11y ago
  YES! There's no reason for websites that are just documents to not work with javascript disabled. For that matter there's no reason that they shouldn't work in text-based browsers (this one still might, since the opacity isn't going to matter in lynx). They work by default, and the only reason that they start not working is because people start adding too many gimmicks. And with modern tools, there's no reason that anything — even a highly interactive app — couldn't be prerendered on the server.
  - rev_bird 11y ago
    I feel like I'm about to wander into a debate that's over my head, but I don't see why one computer (or one small group of computers) should be responsible for doing work that could easily be performed in a more distributed way by people's browsers, if only because it's cheaper to offload that work onto the client and leaves less ways to crash the server-side application. I'm with you 100 percent when it comes to "I can't read this text document because it needs 45 JS libraries to render," that's stupid. But it's probably stupid because it's over-engineered, not because it uses the browser. I feel like this is going to become a bigger and bigger debate in the coming years, and I'm eager to be proven wrong, or at least understand the other side. But if I'm building the next great web-based spreadsheets application (I'm not), my immediate and overwhelming success is going to be WAY easier to manage if the majority of my code is being executed on the millions of computers calling in to use it, not on the three servers running in my auto scaling group. Why WOULDN'T I pick that option?
lukeschlather 11y ago
I've become addicted to the reader mode button in Firefox. Allowed me to totally ignore it and keep JS disabled. There are quite a few sites I don't even try to view in Chrome anymore, I just drop them into Firefox and use the reader button.
Rudism 11y ago
Author of the original article here. I chose this template for my blog because I liked the clean, simple layout. I've been meaning to remove some of the JS functionality and fix some styling stuff for a while now. I didn't realize the fade-in thing rendered the site completely unviewable without JS. I'll be fixing it soon.
- TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
  Thank you kindly! And again, the fade-in (although I don't like said effects personally) isn't the problem. The problem is that said fade-in is done via JS with no fallback. (Note that you can generally do fade-ins via CSS, IIRC, or just add a noscript tag that overrides it to full opacity) I suspect that there is other functionality that I'm missing without JS (No sidebar? Buttons to the side that do nothing?), but it's kind of hard to tell.
- davidcollantes 11y ago
  The template you have picked now is harder to read than the previous. With all the JS complains, etc., I never had a problem--and pretty much liked--the previous (NexT) theme.
  - Rudism 11y ago
    Harder to read in what respect? The new theme is actually the one I had planned to use all along, I was just too lazy to make the necessary modifications for code highlighting which is why I went with the other one.
JupiterMoon 11y ago
Whilst I totally agree with you in general about the javascript abuse issue and about websites vs webapps... Check out Firefox reader mode.

johnchristopher 11y ago

When I alt tabbed to the site there was a slow fade-in on the menu.

TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
Sidestepping the question of if that actually adds anything to the article - they couldn't be bothered to do the fade-in correctly?

RGamma 11y ago

I find a good way to unfuck those sites is to use something like uMatrix or Web Developer to disable CSS (in uMatrix's case it can't disable inline CSS and needs a page reload, but of course it does a ton of other things and this probably isn't an as important use-case). Also works well when text doesn't properly wrap when the browser window is narrow or when broken menus and bars obscure the content, etc.

TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
I find it rather... ironic, shall I say, when CSS actively hurts the readability of a site. This being one of those cases.
- lemiffe 11y ago
  In what way? I find this website perfectly readable, and the font size and line height were appropriate enough.
  - TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
    I was speaking in the context of with JS disabled. There's a JS-based fade-in on page load (or at least there was; the author mentioned that it'd be changed at some point) that doesn't bother to have a fallback. And as such there's a CSS rule that sets the post opacity to zero (making it unreadable). There are many many many websites that don't work without JS that work if you disable both JS and CSS. This being one of them. That being said, even other than that there are a number of things I don't like about the website. All personal preference, however. (Namely: 85-85-85 font on 255-255-255 background isn't the best, contrast-wise (I have a laptop and am often outside - readability trumps fashion for me); I don't like the trend of narrower and narrower line widths (It looks bad enough on my laptop, on a 2k screen 700px width would just look ridiculous); Ditto, I don't like the trend of higher and higher line heights - 1.2 is plenty, 1.5 is overkill, this site is 1.7; Continuing on the trend of "why do you put so little on the screen", I find the paragraph separation also overkill (1 line between paragraphs or equivalent is fine, and maybe two between sections)))
    - radio4fan 11y ago
      > I don't like the trend of narrower and narrower line widths (It looks bad enough on my laptop, on a 2k screen 700px width would just look ridiculous); The line length (measure) on that page is about 60 ems. This is much longer than the optimal value for readability, which is 30 - 40 ems. > Ditto, I don't like the trend of higher and higher line heights - 1.2 is plenty, 1.5 is overkill, this site is 1.7; As the measure increases, leading (line height) must also increase for legibility, because it's harder to track longer lines with the eye when 'returning' to the start of the next line. A leading of 1.7 ems doesn't seem unreasonable to me for such a long measure. For me, type on the web is a lot better than it used to be: tiny type on ridiculously long lines. There are some holdouts though; Hacker News for example.

nissehulth 11y ago

+1 When I click a link and see no content, most often I close the tab and forget about it. Is it really that hard to display simple content without JS nowadays?

shadowmint 11y ago

oh come on. It's 2015, not 1999. If you don't have javascript enabled, do you honestly expect to be able to read half of the internet?

cm2187 11y ago
For privacy and security I do the same. Requiring javascript to just view a blog article is insane.
- shadowmint 11y ago
  Don't be ridiculous. There's something to be said for supporting accessibility, and I completely endorse that, but if you turn javascript off because you want to, don't complain when you can't read or use a modern website. The web uses javascript. Get used to it.
  - gadrfgaesgysd 11y ago
    "modern website" The text is in plain format in the source file. What does the JS add besides actually showing the text. Nothing. In 1999 the Web had aligned text, fonts, and hyperlinks. In 2015 we need JS to do this!?
    - TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
      Agreed. As I said: it's a trivial fix.
  - mondoshawan 11y ago
    Don't be myopic: accessibility standards do not require JS.
  - wtbob 11y ago
    > There's something to be said for supporting accessibility, and I completely endorse that, but if you turn javascript off because you want to, don't complain when you can't read or use a modern website. > The web uses javascript. Get used to it. There's absolutely no reason to require the execution of potentially malicious code in order to read an article. Yes, web apps require JavaScript (and I don't use very many of them, for precisely that reason), but a web page, that is a resource fetched via HTTP (the hypertext transfer protocol) and encoded in HTML (hypertext markup language), simply doesn't and shouldn't. The Internet is about communication; it's about the exchange of information.

Fiahil 11y ago

Isn't the effect identically achievable using the `transform` css property? Why would anyone use JS in this case?

userbinator 11y ago

I saw this comment before reading the article completely, and thought it was about being expelled for using JS. I wouldn't be surprised if, to someone who knew only HTML, JS looked like "hacking".

TeMPOraL 11y ago

Today's web is ridiculous. It looks like if developers and designers are increasingly becoming a bunch of kids with delusions of grandeur and IQ around 50, living in total denial about reasonableness of their work. Just imagine you're going to the newsstand to buy a newspaper, and instead you get a package containing blank sheets of paper, a microfilm scanner and a roll of microfilm, with instructions telling you to go home, scan the film and print the content yourself. You'd be on fire. You'd write to the publisher, asking them what the fuck they're doing. Even ignoring the additional time and money you'll have to spend printing the newsppaper yourself, it surely must be cheaper to print it all with industrial machines than making an equal amounts of goddamn microfilm and scanners for it! Economies of scale and stuff. And yet this is normal on the web. Prepping content for client-side JS generation takes similar amounts of time (if not more) to just rendering the page on server. And then they have to send a) the content, and b) JS to render it, which takes more space than a rendered page, and then every client has to render it on its own. They're wasting electricity on every goddamn step of the pipeline, from servers through the network to the client. It's like electricity is free so they can all show everyone a giant fuck you, because hey, if it's free then let's waste it all. Ok, I got carried away. But my point still stands. Dear JS-first website maker - I'm not willing to view your ads until you start covering my electricity bills for all the coal that got wasted on your idiotic client-side-rendering contraptions.

adrusi 11y ago
YES! There's no reason for websites that are just documents to not work with javascript disabled. For that matter there's no reason that they shouldn't work in text-based browsers (this one still might, since the opacity isn't going to matter in lynx). They work by default, and the only reason that they start not working is because people start adding too many gimmicks. And with modern tools, there's no reason that anything — even a highly interactive app — couldn't be prerendered on the server.
- rev_bird 11y ago
  I feel like I'm about to wander into a debate that's over my head, but I don't see why one computer (or one small group of computers) should be responsible for doing work that could easily be performed in a more distributed way by people's browsers, if only because it's cheaper to offload that work onto the client and leaves less ways to crash the server-side application. I'm with you 100 percent when it comes to "I can't read this text document because it needs 45 JS libraries to render," that's stupid. But it's probably stupid because it's over-engineered, not because it uses the browser. I feel like this is going to become a bigger and bigger debate in the coming years, and I'm eager to be proven wrong, or at least understand the other side. But if I'm building the next great web-based spreadsheets application (I'm not), my immediate and overwhelming success is going to be WAY easier to manage if the majority of my code is being executed on the millions of computers calling in to use it, not on the three servers running in my auto scaling group. Why WOULDN'T I pick that option?

lukeschlather 11y ago

I've become addicted to the reader mode button in Firefox. Allowed me to totally ignore it and keep JS disabled. There are quite a few sites I don't even try to view in Chrome anymore, I just drop them into Firefox and use the reader button.

Rudism 11y ago

Author of the original article here. I chose this template for my blog because I liked the clean, simple layout. I've been meaning to remove some of the JS functionality and fix some styling stuff for a while now. I didn't realize the fade-in thing rendered the site completely unviewable without JS. I'll be fixing it soon.

TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
Thank you kindly! And again, the fade-in (although I don't like said effects personally) isn't the problem. The problem is that said fade-in is done via JS with no fallback. (Note that you can generally do fade-ins via CSS, IIRC, or just add a noscript tag that overrides it to full opacity) I suspect that there is other functionality that I'm missing without JS (No sidebar? Buttons to the side that do nothing?), but it's kind of hard to tell.
davidcollantes 11y ago
The template you have picked now is harder to read than the previous. With all the JS complains, etc., I never had a problem--and pretty much liked--the previous (NexT) theme.
- Rudism 11y ago
  Harder to read in what respect? The new theme is actually the one I had planned to use all along, I was just too lazy to make the necessary modifications for code highlighting which is why I went with the other one.

JupiterMoon 11y ago

Whilst I totally agree with you in general about the javascript abuse issue and about websites vs webapps... Check out Firefox reader mode.