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I'm so tired of people using "it doesn't work without JavaScript!" as an argument. To me it sounds as relevant as saying "it doesn't work without HDMI!" What i

by iLoch 10y ago

I'm so tired of people using "it doesn't work without JavaScript!" as an argument. To me it sounds as relevant as saying "it doesn't work without HDMI!" What is so bad about JS that you just can't use the web with it enabled? Grow up. The web is a platform that is evolving far beyond its original intent. In a few years its going to be a binary delivery platform. And that's great news. The idea that the web needs to stay the way it was designed in the 90s is what's really regressive. Here's what matters about the web: - Linking - Standards for Web APIs - Content delivery protocols Everything else - as far as I'm concerned - is a transient feature which will eventually be superseded. The mentality that nothing should change about the web is incomprehensible to me. I just don't get it. Edit: Inevitably, someone will tell me that the web is faster without JS, and another might claim accessibility as a problem. - A faster web is made possible by faster devices on faster networks. Current constraints are far less relevant when we're discussing future technology. For now, yes page size is a problem but I absolutely wouldn't want that to shape future technology. ISPs have the power to improve their services as required. - Accessibility is a standards problem, not a content type problem. Accessibility software should be expected to adapt to new technology like anything else. As long as we provide the tools for these platforms to succeed, the type of content that is being served (whether it's plain text, JS, or binary) shouldn't affect anything.

askldfhjkasfhd 10y ago
The problem, as people see it, is there is a whole space of websites that use features they don't need. Think of all the 1pageapp content sites. To borrow your comparison, people who are bothered by what I describe above see it like a website saying, "Hey, we won't work on your device unless it's HDMI because of the design choices we made!"
- iLoch 10y ago
  The difference now is that most people are using browsers that will automatically update in order to work with new features.
alistproducer2 10y ago
I disable JSbecause, on a lot of sites, I'm only there to read words on a page and those words come up instantly without JS and in as long as 30 seconds with it. Why do you think Google created AMP (which is just a fancy way of telling devs to stop using JS for text sites)? Look, there are plenty of site for which JS makes a huge difference - proper web applications. For every one of those site there are 9 that load half a MB of cruft so they can animate their stupid banner.
- iLoch 10y ago
  I'm not saying text content doesn't have its place, but what I am saying is that unless you're absolutely certain your users aren't going to be using JS (hint: that's effectively no one) then it's just not worth your time to accommodate those users - especially when they optionally disable JS, AND you have to degrade the experience for the rest of your users in most practical applications. How often do you design features for 1% of your users?
  - kinlan 10y ago
    A lot of it is about performance, if you need JS to fetch the content of your site after the SPA or Shell has loaded then you are incurring a significant amount of overhead for something that could have been streamed from the server and rendered as it was parsed by the browser.
    - iLoch 10y ago
      Performance will come as the need develops. Yes it's faster to render something on the server right now, but that may not be the case in the near future. The concept of loading something from the server is also only accounting for a very specific use case. These days most websites will require more data from the server after the webpage has been loaded anyway. Server rendering simply wont make sense for some binary applications, such as games.
      - robin_reala 10y ago
mindslight 10y ago
https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/leastPower.html https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/leastPower.html From the perspective of a web developer or publisher, they of course want as much power as possible. But this is really a tradeoff, directly taking away power from end users - the accessibility you handwaved away, as well as things like adblocking, user-styling, caching, and every other unenumerable concern of endpoints. I'm not saying that a delivery system for opaque executable blobs isn't the inevitable fate of the web, just that this shouldn't be viewed as progress but rather decay.
- iLoch 10y ago
  > the accessibility you handwaved away, as well as things like adblocking, user-styling, caching, and every other unenumerable concern of endpoints. You are speaking of things that can and should be addressed with APIs provided by the browser.
  - mindslight 10y ago
    Are you thinking this API would be extension-facing, or page-facing? For the former, then the browser still needs to be able to understand the page to implement this API functionality. Turing-completeness is incompatible with this understanding. For the latter, then that requires page authors to explicitly opt-in to those mechanisms. Obviously they won't do this when incentives are opposed (eg ad blocking). And even in the cooperative case, would require pages to anticipate all features viewers would require.
rev 10y ago
And someone will mention how a full-scale language inside a browser is the hugest attack vector of all. Soon as a binary delivery platform - yay!
- iLoch 10y ago
  It's not a real environment though. It's a sandboxed environment with limited, user-authorized APIs.
  - rev 10y ago
    Nowadays even Wikipedia has a section on JavaScript sandbox implementation errors. Even without taking JS into account, browsers, colossal beasts they are, have had a history of security vulnerabilities in HTML, CSS and image decoding routines. With JS added... again, Wikipedia says it best: "JavaScript provides an interface to a wide range of browser capabilities, some of which may have flaws such as buffer overflows." Ergo, no amount of "sandboxing" will ever save you from trouble.
chriswarbo 10y ago
> I'm so tired of people using "it doesn't work without JavaScript!" as an argument. To me it sounds as relevant as saying "it doesn't work without HDMI!" I don't understand your reasoning; I don't have any HDMI equipment (except my RaspberryPis, which are headless servers anyway), so I certainly would avoid anything that's HDMI-only. Just because you, at the moment, only use the Web for a few pre-approved purposes (e.g. viewing rendered pages) via the handful of user agents which support Javascript, on operating systems supported by those user agents, on hardware supported by those operating systems, which is powerful enough to run it all, that doesn't mean everyone else is. Some are less fortunate, as they have older, or less-powerful equipment. Some are more fortunate, as they are using the Web in more imaginative and novel ways than you are.
- random_rr 10y ago
  Okie doke, you are missing out on a lot of HDMI-equipped hardware, and if you don't use JS, you are missing out on a lot of JS features. Web pages can be rendered any which way you please, it's no skin off a developer's back if you don't have JS enabled for their JS project.
  - chriswarbo 10y ago
    > Okie doke, you are missing out on a lot of HDMI-equipped hardware, and if you don't use JS, you are missing out on a lot of JS features. I don't specifically avoid HDMI, I've just never encountered a situation which involved HDMI. Also, I hear it's riddled with DRM, and I don't see the point upgrading when it seems to be becoming obsolete anyway (DisplayPort? ThunderBolt? Newer USBs? etc.)
thescribe 10y ago
If your web page doesn't work without javascript it is probably doing something between malicious (Like refusing to let me download an element displayed on a page) to staggeringly malicious (Like tracking me with analytics) to petty (Like dictating how I read a page). It's not that nothing should change, it's that change should make things better. I firmly believe pages made better by javascript are such a small minority as to be an rare exception, but overall the web is so much better with that 'feature' disabled.
kitsunesoba 10y ago
I have no issue with JavaScript itself. I have issues with what web developers do with it: - Hideous wastefulness of resources, causing constant unnecessary repaints, enormous RAM usage, etc - “Experiencejacking”: things like scroll hijacking, back button hijacking, etc - All the privacy invasions that JS enables These wouldn’t be issues if sites suffering from them were the minority, but they’re not. Most sites have mountains of poorly optimized JavaScript that gives zero thought to performance or resource consumption. Once it works, it’s shipped. The fact is that front end web dev culture as a whole places very little value in things like performance, battery life, resources, and ultimately, respect of the end user’s desires, and that’s a huge problem. As long as the whizz-bang shiny flashy checkboxes are checked, it’s all good.

by iLoch 10y ago

askldfhjkasfhd 10y ago

The problem, as people see it, is there is a whole space of websites that use features they don't need. Think of all the 1pageapp content sites. To borrow your comparison, people who are bothered by what I describe above see it like a website saying, "Hey, we won't work on your device unless it's HDMI because of the design choices we made!"

iLoch 10y ago
The difference now is that most people are using browsers that will automatically update in order to work with new features.

alistproducer2 10y ago

I disable JSbecause, on a lot of sites, I'm only there to read words on a page and those words come up instantly without JS and in as long as 30 seconds with it. Why do you think Google created AMP (which is just a fancy way of telling devs to stop using JS for text sites)? Look, there are plenty of site for which JS makes a huge difference - proper web applications. For every one of those site there are 9 that load half a MB of cruft so they can animate their stupid banner.

iLoch 10y ago
I'm not saying text content doesn't have its place, but what I am saying is that unless you're absolutely certain your users aren't going to be using JS (hint: that's effectively no one) then it's just not worth your time to accommodate those users - especially when they optionally disable JS, AND you have to degrade the experience for the rest of your users in most practical applications. How often do you design features for 1% of your users?
- kinlan 10y ago
  A lot of it is about performance, if you need JS to fetch the content of your site after the SPA or Shell has loaded then you are incurring a significant amount of overhead for something that could have been streamed from the server and rendered as it was parsed by the browser.
  - iLoch 10y ago
    Performance will come as the need develops. Yes it's faster to render something on the server right now, but that may not be the case in the near future. The concept of loading something from the server is also only accounting for a very specific use case. These days most websites will require more data from the server after the webpage has been loaded anyway. Server rendering simply wont make sense for some binary applications, such as games.
    - robin_reala 10y ago

mindslight 10y ago

https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/leastPower.html https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/leastPower.html From the perspective of a web developer or publisher, they of course want as much power as possible. But this is really a tradeoff, directly taking away power from end users - the accessibility you handwaved away, as well as things like adblocking, user-styling, caching, and every other unenumerable concern of endpoints. I'm not saying that a delivery system for opaque executable blobs isn't the inevitable fate of the web, just that this shouldn't be viewed as progress but rather decay.

iLoch 10y ago
> the accessibility you handwaved away, as well as things like adblocking, user-styling, caching, and every other unenumerable concern of endpoints. You are speaking of things that can and should be addressed with APIs provided by the browser.
- mindslight 10y ago
  Are you thinking this API would be extension-facing, or page-facing? For the former, then the browser still needs to be able to understand the page to implement this API functionality. Turing-completeness is incompatible with this understanding. For the latter, then that requires page authors to explicitly opt-in to those mechanisms. Obviously they won't do this when incentives are opposed (eg ad blocking). And even in the cooperative case, would require pages to anticipate all features viewers would require.

rev 10y ago

And someone will mention how a full-scale language inside a browser is the hugest attack vector of all. Soon as a binary delivery platform - yay!

iLoch 10y ago
It's not a real environment though. It's a sandboxed environment with limited, user-authorized APIs.
- rev 10y ago
  Nowadays even Wikipedia has a section on JavaScript sandbox implementation errors. Even without taking JS into account, browsers, colossal beasts they are, have had a history of security vulnerabilities in HTML, CSS and image decoding routines. With JS added... again, Wikipedia says it best: "JavaScript provides an interface to a wide range of browser capabilities, some of which may have flaws such as buffer overflows." Ergo, no amount of "sandboxing" will ever save you from trouble.

chriswarbo 10y ago

> I'm so tired of people using "it doesn't work without JavaScript!" as an argument. To me it sounds as relevant as saying "it doesn't work without HDMI!" I don't understand your reasoning; I don't have any HDMI equipment (except my RaspberryPis, which are headless servers anyway), so I certainly would avoid anything that's HDMI-only. Just because you, at the moment, only use the Web for a few pre-approved purposes (e.g. viewing rendered pages) via the handful of user agents which support Javascript, on operating systems supported by those user agents, on hardware supported by those operating systems, which is powerful enough to run it all, that doesn't mean everyone else is. Some are less fortunate, as they have older, or less-powerful equipment. Some are more fortunate, as they are using the Web in more imaginative and novel ways than you are.

random_rr 10y ago
Okie doke, you are missing out on a lot of HDMI-equipped hardware, and if you don't use JS, you are missing out on a lot of JS features. Web pages can be rendered any which way you please, it's no skin off a developer's back if you don't have JS enabled for their JS project.
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  > Okie doke, you are missing out on a lot of HDMI-equipped hardware, and if you don't use JS, you are missing out on a lot of JS features. I don't specifically avoid HDMI, I've just never encountered a situation which involved HDMI. Also, I hear it's riddled with DRM, and I don't see the point upgrading when it seems to be becoming obsolete anyway (DisplayPort? ThunderBolt? Newer USBs? etc.)

thescribe 10y ago

If your web page doesn't work without javascript it is probably doing something between malicious (Like refusing to let me download an element displayed on a page) to staggeringly malicious (Like tracking me with analytics) to petty (Like dictating how I read a page). It's not that nothing should change, it's that change should make things better. I firmly believe pages made better by javascript are such a small minority as to be an rare exception, but overall the web is so much better with that 'feature' disabled.

kitsunesoba 10y ago

I have no issue with JavaScript itself. I have issues with what web developers do with it: - Hideous wastefulness of resources, causing constant unnecessary repaints, enormous RAM usage, etc - “Experiencejacking”: things like scroll hijacking, back button hijacking, etc - All the privacy invasions that JS enables These wouldn’t be issues if sites suffering from them were the minority, but they’re not. Most sites have mountains of poorly optimized JavaScript that gives zero thought to performance or resource consumption. Once it works, it’s shipped. The fact is that front end web dev culture as a whole places very little value in things like performance, battery life, resources, and ultimately, respect of the end user’s desires, and that’s a huge problem. As long as the whizz-bang shiny flashy checkboxes are checked, it’s all good.