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> The site shows blank page without JS enabled. I did not understand why one would need one megabyte of minified Javascript to display a list of 10 items. It's

• mibbiting 10y ago
  This is why computers become slower and slower, and people have to upgrade. Because lazy developers make idiotic choices. It's a static list of items. Hardly very efficient to load all that javascript, do a server request, just to display a list is it.
  • tokenizerrr 10y ago
    Perhaps we should be going back to writing websites in assembly.
    • the_gastropod 10y ago
      I don't think this is a fair argument. Writing web pages as single page JS apps is _harder_ than writing them as server-side generated html responses. And in many cases (this one as a great example), the user experience is worse for having done so.
    • ddorian43 10y ago
      See http://webassembly.org/ http://webassembly.org/ . While not raw assembly, we have to because of the js nonsense. This will ofcourse also increase the jsnonsense, cause now everything will be more efficient so we can put alot more crap.
      • tokenizerrr 10y ago
        I am aware of webassembly, and I'm sure that codedokode would explode if s/he were to notice that a website such as this was written using it. It wouldn't run without JavaScript being enabled, for one.
        • codedokode 10y ago
          In future publishers will probably use web assembly for DRM, for example, to render decrypted article text on a canvas so that it cannot be copied, zoomed, read aloud or viewed without advertisement and annoying popups. Maybe you will change your mind about Javascript then.
          • mitchty 10y ago
            You jest, but in one of the discussions for EME, that exact case was brought up. Only they wanted to drm javascript sent to the browser. We got rid of Flash only to see a new hydra head emerge. People clamoring for javascript applications should be careful what they wish for. They just might get it.
    • inflagranti 10y ago
      This is such a bad example, as JS is actually more low level than a declarative language like HTML.
  • romanovcode 10y ago
    While I totally agree about this site, it's stupid to disregard JS as a whole. Imagine websites like FB without JS - it would be horrible.
    • beagle3 10y ago
      You don't have to imagine, you can try: https://mbasic.facebook.com/ https://mbasic.facebook.com/ - a lot of people prefer it to the standard monstrosity.
      • eeZah7Ux 10y ago
        Good example. After getting used to the 1998 feel, it's much more practical than the usual one.
      • ecma 10y ago
        I use mbasic.facebook as my main was of interacting with Facebook. I acknowledge that my choice to disable JavaScript is unusual and will jump through some hoops because of that, but it's not excusable for a website to display /nothing/ pre-script like the OP does.
      • lucideer 10y ago
        The great thing about this is that it's paginated. You can literally "scroll infinitely" through feeds without creating a ridiculous scroll offset and filling up browser memory (or losing Ctrl-F functionality due to Facebook's complex memory-saving exercises)
      • sealthedeal 10y ago
        this makes me miss the OG fb. I dont use facebook much, but I think I would use it quite a bit more if this was the layout.
      • mixmastamyk 10y ago
        Nice but it could use a bit more whitespace, feels crowded.
    • tluyben2 10y ago
• p4bl0 10y ago
  This point of view forgets the fact that loading 1MB of JS instead of 10KB of HTML is actually a bad thing. It consumes bandwidth and energy, and thus has an effect on the environment, for instance.
  • tokenizerrr 10y ago
    I think the pointless act of watching cat videos and pornography has a much more significant effect on the environment. Driving cars, too. By that reasoning, these things must be really evil.
    • p4bl0 10y ago
      Of course, but the comparison is a bit unfair. If you need a car to go to your workplace you can't really do otherwise. Here it is mostly trivial to make a better choice, and webpage loading and rendering would be faster, it only has advantages.
    • foepys 10y ago
      Until you notice that just visiting Facebook keeps a 10-30% load on your CPU while doing nothing. Now imagine how many people are using Facebook.
    • taneq 10y ago
      Yeah, but all those things make me happy. Having to wait for a web site to load a full megabyte of useless data for no reason doesn't make me happy.
      • philh 10y ago
        This is a far stronger argument against JS-driven websites than the environmental argument. Would you ever make the argument: "this website would be so much easier to use with a little Javascript, but Javascript is bad for the environment, so it should remain without"? If not, the environment isn't actually a factor in the reasoning process. It's just a club to wield when it supports what you've already decided is the correct answer.
• beagle3 10y ago
  No, it' because whoever made the site is ignoring the age-old simple practice of showing something (even the text "This website requires javascript") even if not all resources have loaded. It is entirely unlike the examples you gave. Especially because his browser does show ~99% of the internet properly (with various degrees of functionality, but still something does come up), and that there spiders, proxies, screenreaders, and other useful software which will also see nothing on this page.
  • gsnedders 10y ago
    All major screenreaders work from the DOM and the accessibility tree nowadays, and have done for a long time at this point. Dynamic content is no problem in and of itself.
    • devgutt 10y ago
      Unless you are fetching data async. Google and other will not wait for data.
      • Steppschuh 10y ago
        That's not true. Google indeed waits for async content to load for a given amount of time. You can inspect this from the Google webmaster tools.
        • devgutt 10y ago
          I did a lot of tests on this and Google just didn't wait, no matter the configuration. I tested using webmaster tools. The App was built using React, and I ended up implementing SSR to fix the problem. There are a lot of posts that hack this embedding JSON directly on the page. I didn't find any post that figured out a way to make this works through async API requests. I would thank you if you point one in that direction. Maybe I'm doing something wrong.
          • vlod 10y ago
• codedokode 10y ago
  Pages load faster with JS disabled, show less advertisement and no popups. Browser processes take less memory. Social network tracking scripts (usually disguised as share buttons) do not work. Annoying fixed headers, footers and sidebar usually don't work without JS too. I got used to this comfortable way of browsing the web and seeing more sites that don't work without JS doesn't make me happy.
  • briandear 10y ago
    I think the disconnect is that people have conflated websites with web applications. I fully expect an application to use JS because essentially you're providing (or attempting to provide) desktop-analogous functionality in the browser. However a "website" has the purpose of 'displaying information' -- essentially some form of text + images akin to a newspaper page. In those cases JavaScript is an enhancement but ought not be a requirement. For a web application though, not using JavaScript is like a car pulled by donkeys. Sure you can sit in it and try to steer but it doesn't provide optimal functionality. However on the other hand, anyone expecting a good web experience in 2016 without JavaScript is fighting a Quixotic battle.
    • codedokode 10y ago
      You are right. There are web applications (like Google Docs) and simple collections of web pages (a typical Wordpress blog). I am not against JS or SPA architecture generally but I am against using complicated solutions for simple problems. Using rich frontend application to display just a list of links is obviously over-engineering.
  • JasonSage 10y ago
    So you're in a memory-constrained environment, you can't be bothered to block social network tracking scripts by another means (some of those still load as pixels so you haven't gotten rid of them entirely), you don't like fixed headers, footers, or sidebars, and you're taking it all out on this site because the fastest way they could bang out their little idea did not include server-side rendering in the initial iteration. You're making a conscious decision based on the trade-offs at hand and saying that every website should double down on server side rendering to cater to your intolerance of how modern web browsing works. That's just not feasible.
• tambourine_man 10y ago
  That's not an equivalent analogy. Disabling JS displays nothing at all, while changing text and background color is a progressive enhancement. Content should still be accessible without JavaScript, even if, perhaps, in a less convenient way, i.e., every click reloads the entire page
  • Blahah 10y ago
    Why? Every browser has JS, and it's a core web technology.
    • efaref 10y ago
      I quite often use Lynx[1], which does not support JS. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)
    • adrianN 10y ago
      Does every screen reader have Javascript?
      • vertex-four 10y ago
        Screen readers integrate with browsers, they don't implement an entire browser on their own, so yes.
    • __derek__ 10y ago
      You and GP are missing the point: the site uses an ocean-liner's worth of JavaScript in order to do anything at all. HTML is also a core web technology and is arguably more "core" than JavaScript.
  • adim86 10y ago
    But why? Who made the rule that websites should work without JS? Content being accessible without JS is best practice. I get it and it was very valuable a long time ago. It comes in handy sometimes today but for most of the internet accessing world, working without JS is not a requirement. I do not get why people ding products for not working when JS is not enabled.
• nilved 10y ago
  If JavaScript is an essential Web technology to you you are a bad Web developer.
• Flimm 10y ago
  Complaining that pages are black because you disabled CSS is a legitimate complaint. Plenty of people need to modify or disable or ignore CSS for accessibility reasons.
• codedokode 10y ago
  Requiring JS support to display a list of links is like requiring a user to download an application to view the site. No sane person would do this, right? Oh wait...
• rpcope1 10y ago
  If you're using tons of bloated Javascript "just because" for something that could arguably work with just static pages, you're doing something very very wrong.
• Sir_Substance 10y ago
  Most technologies can be wrangled to do pretty much anything, but that doesn't mean you should use them. Every browser since I was a child has had a download manager of some kind built in, but that didn't stop the last academic paper website I tried to use from writing their own using a java webapp, of all things, and refusing to let me download their pdf's with anything else. If your site looks like garbage when I turn the javascript off, fair enough. If your site breaks because it needs to do client side process, then that's on me, fair call. But if your website can't even load text without javascript, then you're using a carpenters square as a hammer. Loading text is what html does. That's it's one and only job, and it's really fucking good at it. Way better at it than javascript is. If your website cannot load text without javascript, you're a shitty developer, because you're rejecting the objectively correct tool and shoehorning a far more complex tool into it's place. That's how you get security vulnerabilities and high maintenance costs. It's the very definition of over engineering.