11 ms·

If I may, it seems to me like there are several possible points of discussion: 1) Javascript is bad (vs. Javascript is good and variations thereof) 2) The use

by jaclaz 9y ago

If I may, it seems to me like there are several possible points of discussion: 1) Javascript is bad (vs. Javascript is good and variations thereof) 2) The use a lot of websites make of Javascript is overcomplex, gratuitious, uncalled for, intrusive, etc. 3) Sites should provide some (even minimal) functionality to people browsing them without Javascript #1 is largely a matter of personal opinions #2 is a known, undeniable fact #3 is where everyone could contribute Personally I browse normally with javascript turned off since years (and I use another browser with the capapbility to display the site "fully" when really-really needed). Particularly when browsing HN, I follow given links and often avoid a lot of pop-ups, ads, and what not, and from time to time, when I find a site that won't load AND I really think that the linked to site is worth it, I use the "other" browser. What is curious is that most "new" products, Saas, whatever simply fail, showing just a blank page, that is exactly what the site shouldn't do. I would gladly accept a "You need Javascript enabled in order to fully appreciate the site" kind of message, but only if some (basic, simplified how much you want it, even text only, etc.) content is shown nonetheless. I simply cannot bear the "blank page" or the "Your browser is not supported, please download Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and try again". This makes me sure that the people behind the site in the best case have not understood the "showcase" nature of a website and in the worst case care nothing about user (please read as customer) experience. So, if you create a site, consider how a part (even small) of the visitors may have not javascript enabled but they are anyway potential customers, they are somehow anyway interested in your site contents, by making their no-javascript experience so miserable you are turning them away from your site, sometimes forever, which is the perfect negation of the reason why you put the site together in first instance (to make your whatever content visible to the world).

linkmotif 9y ago
I simply will not spend time tailoring a nascent or even mature product to 0.0001% or whatever minscule percentage of the population turns off JS. If you turn off JS, you get a blank screen. Why should I accommodate your cohort? Why write unit tests for someone who takes a standardish client with above 1% market share and does something completely unstandard with it?
- qwtel 9y ago
  because its good engineering. you don't know what might break your JS in the future. you also don't know which user agents people will use in the future. I was quite surprised to discover that some "UC browser for Android" had quietly racked up a 9% usage[^1]. UC doesn't come without JS, but has a limited feature set, and without feature testing there's a good chance it will break your site. It broke [mine](https://qwtel.com/hydejack/ https://qwtel.com/hydejack/), if it wasn't for feature testing and serving vanilla HTML. Also, and I know it seems impossible, but sometimes programmers ship broken code. Again, not relying on JS gives you safety net to fall back on. [^1]: http://caniuse.com/usage-table http://caniuse.com/usage-table
  - linkmotif 9y ago
    Nonsense. This is definitively YAGNI. Good engineering is accommodating the greatest number of people with the resources you have in the least amount of time. Thinking about some abstract future scenario is categorically not good engineering.
    - qwtel 9y ago
      you're right. let's get rid of safety nets, because YAGNI. it's so efficient!
    - throwaway47861 9y ago
      You misspelled "good bean-counting". Good engineering requires you to cover for everything you can. Case in point: car seatbelts and airbags. Most people don't crash, right? But you aren't seeing the car manufacturers remove seatbelts and airbags.
      - to3m 9y ago
        When everything is made from beans, the bean supply must be kept in mind.
      - sbov 9y ago
        Counter point: many cars aren't made to accommodate people as tall as a professional basketball player. Should I call them all bad (or at least not good) engineering?
feedjoelpie 9y ago
Even though I am a frequent advocate of leaning on more old school techniques for building web apps (even with new school tools), I vehemently disagree that this is a generally worthy cause. A small list of (I think non-controversial) things: 1. You browse without JS. You're a power user. You already know why the page doesn't work. A courtesy message would be nice, I guess, but it seems fairly pointless. 2. Should my HTML and CSS still target IE7-friendliness? IE7 users still have more market share than actual humans who browse without JS. They get treated like lepers in the Year 0, and we all seem to be okay with that. 3. Well-designed use of JS can help distribute computation load that might otherwise all fall on the server. A very contrived-to-be-important (but fairly common) example of this is scaling/cropping an image before it's uploaded. Or, even though I have some other reasons to hate on SPAs, page rendering itself. The no-JS user is more expensive to serve than the typical user. 4. Except for some extreme cases of JS reliance, search engine spiders are a head and shoulders more accommodating to developers' choices than no-JS users are. I just don't think that making accommodations for no-JS power users, who are not plentiful, and know full well how to turn JS back on, is valuable. Making JS bundles smaller and making them load more efficiently? That's a worthy cause for sure. But people who browse without JS at all are extreme outliers in the 1st world, and all of them know how to toggle it back on. Developing countries? If I were trying to serve those users I would do the research and make choices accordingly.
- jaclaz 9y ago
  >1. You browse without JS. You're a power user. You already know why the page doesn't work. A courtesy message would be nice, I guess, but it seems fairly pointless. Well, the point is that a lot of people post their site on HN as "Show HN", and the "intended audience" is then (or should be) "power users", which should also mean that "power users" (few as they might be) are potentially interested to your site, but you make sure that only a subset of these power users can access your site (not necessarily in full, sometimes a simple text summing up what the thing is about would be enough to either - as I do if the page doesn't load - discard it or get me interested enough to turn javascript on/use the "other" browser). If you don't post your site on "Show HN" the missing "no-javascript message" is only a (small) lack of courtesy, if you do post it, it sounds (to me) like a plain lack of attention. In the real world, you open a new shop in town, and advertise on the local newspaper "everyone is invited for the shop opening tuesday at 7:00 P.M.", than you put at the door a couple big guys that only let in those dressed "black tie". I do have a suitable attire, but I am not going home to change into it, not without having at least the possibility to peek inside your shop and see what it is about. Will I become a customer? Maybe yes, maybe not, but more likely not.
reitanqild 9y ago
#1 is largely a matter of personal opinions This is wrong. It's amazing what Javascript can do now but it is only amazing because it was a retarded child with abusive parents (early browsers with wildly different implementations). That taken into account its amazing how far it has come. Sincerely, The frontend developer
- jaclaz 9y ago
  >#1 is largely a matter of personal opinions >This is wrong. ... in your opinion ...
  - reitanqild 9y ago
    >>>#1 is largely a matter of personal opinions >>This is wrong. >... in your opinion ... Yep. But sometimes my opinion is right ;-)
biztos 9y ago
For #2 (JS abuse by site owners) I wonder if it might be useful to set size limits, like: maximum allowed bytes per resource type (.js, .css, .*), per file and per page, possibly with some local-vs-remote adjustments. You could just read the Content-Length header and drop the connection if the site is over the user's limits (at which point you'd want to display a status message instead of the partial site).
gvb 9y ago
The sites that REALLY piss me off are the ones with a timed redirect like: <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1;url=http://www.example.com/nojavascript" http://www.example.com/nojavascript" /> which show a usable flash of the site for one second and then bounce me to a useless "You must enable JavaScript to use this site." page. By the flash I know that this is technically not correct.
- angus-g 9y ago
  NoScript includes a toggle to disable exactly this behaviour (meta tags within noscript tags). meta refreshes in general are pretty annoying as a user though
pier25 9y ago
1) It's irrelevant since it's the only language we have on the browser. 2) I think this is actually a cultural problem. Are users steering away from overcomplex/bloated/intrusive websites? If not, why not? 3) That's an argument similar to should a site support IE8? IMO it really boils down to the cost vs the benefit of supporting user without JS. And that of course will depend on your target users.
kalleboo 9y ago
One problem is that more and more, people expect the browsing experience to include a lot of responsive features that require a bunch of client-side JavaScript. Except JavaScript blows, the emerging JS extension ecosystem that tries to fix that is still highly in flux (and mostly blows), so developers try to keep their server-side stuff NOT JavaScript, and then supporting server-side rendering means re-implementing everything twice. Of course, this doesn't excuse document-centric sites like news and blogs.

by jaclaz 9y ago

linkmotif 9y ago

I simply will not spend time tailoring a nascent or even mature product to 0.0001% or whatever minscule percentage of the population turns off JS. If you turn off JS, you get a blank screen. Why should I accommodate your cohort? Why write unit tests for someone who takes a standardish client with above 1% market share and does something completely unstandard with it?

qwtel 9y ago
because its good engineering. you don't know what might break your JS in the future. you also don't know which user agents people will use in the future. I was quite surprised to discover that some "UC browser for Android" had quietly racked up a 9% usage[^1]. UC doesn't come without JS, but has a limited feature set, and without feature testing there's a good chance it will break your site. It broke [mine](https://qwtel.com/hydejack/ https://qwtel.com/hydejack/), if it wasn't for feature testing and serving vanilla HTML. Also, and I know it seems impossible, but sometimes programmers ship broken code. Again, not relying on JS gives you safety net to fall back on. [^1]: http://caniuse.com/usage-table http://caniuse.com/usage-table
- linkmotif 9y ago
  Nonsense. This is definitively YAGNI. Good engineering is accommodating the greatest number of people with the resources you have in the least amount of time. Thinking about some abstract future scenario is categorically not good engineering.
  - qwtel 9y ago
    you're right. let's get rid of safety nets, because YAGNI. it's so efficient!
  - throwaway47861 9y ago
    You misspelled "good bean-counting". Good engineering requires you to cover for everything you can. Case in point: car seatbelts and airbags. Most people don't crash, right? But you aren't seeing the car manufacturers remove seatbelts and airbags.
    - to3m 9y ago
      When everything is made from beans, the bean supply must be kept in mind.
    - sbov 9y ago
      Counter point: many cars aren't made to accommodate people as tall as a professional basketball player. Should I call them all bad (or at least not good) engineering?

feedjoelpie 9y ago

Even though I am a frequent advocate of leaning on more old school techniques for building web apps (even with new school tools), I vehemently disagree that this is a generally worthy cause. A small list of (I think non-controversial) things: 1. You browse without JS. You're a power user. You already know why the page doesn't work. A courtesy message would be nice, I guess, but it seems fairly pointless. 2. Should my HTML and CSS still target IE7-friendliness? IE7 users still have more market share than actual humans who browse without JS. They get treated like lepers in the Year 0, and we all seem to be okay with that. 3. Well-designed use of JS can help distribute computation load that might otherwise all fall on the server. A very contrived-to-be-important (but fairly common) example of this is scaling/cropping an image before it's uploaded. Or, even though I have some other reasons to hate on SPAs, page rendering itself. The no-JS user is more expensive to serve than the typical user. 4. Except for some extreme cases of JS reliance, search engine spiders are a head and shoulders more accommodating to developers' choices than no-JS users are. I just don't think that making accommodations for no-JS power users, who are not plentiful, and know full well how to turn JS back on, is valuable. Making JS bundles smaller and making them load more efficiently? That's a worthy cause for sure. But people who browse without JS at all are extreme outliers in the 1st world, and all of them know how to toggle it back on. Developing countries? If I were trying to serve those users I would do the research and make choices accordingly.

jaclaz 9y ago
>1. You browse without JS. You're a power user. You already know why the page doesn't work. A courtesy message would be nice, I guess, but it seems fairly pointless. Well, the point is that a lot of people post their site on HN as "Show HN", and the "intended audience" is then (or should be) "power users", which should also mean that "power users" (few as they might be) are potentially interested to your site, but you make sure that only a subset of these power users can access your site (not necessarily in full, sometimes a simple text summing up what the thing is about would be enough to either - as I do if the page doesn't load - discard it or get me interested enough to turn javascript on/use the "other" browser). If you don't post your site on "Show HN" the missing "no-javascript message" is only a (small) lack of courtesy, if you do post it, it sounds (to me) like a plain lack of attention. In the real world, you open a new shop in town, and advertise on the local newspaper "everyone is invited for the shop opening tuesday at 7:00 P.M.", than you put at the door a couple big guys that only let in those dressed "black tie". I do have a suitable attire, but I am not going home to change into it, not without having at least the possibility to peek inside your shop and see what it is about. Will I become a customer? Maybe yes, maybe not, but more likely not.

reitanqild 9y ago

#1 is largely a matter of personal opinions This is wrong. It's amazing what Javascript can do now but it is only amazing because it was a retarded child with abusive parents (early browsers with wildly different implementations). That taken into account its amazing how far it has come. Sincerely, The frontend developer

jaclaz 9y ago
>#1 is largely a matter of personal opinions >This is wrong. ... in your opinion ...
- reitanqild 9y ago
  >>>#1 is largely a matter of personal opinions >>This is wrong. >... in your opinion ... Yep. But sometimes my opinion is right ;-)

biztos 9y ago

For #2 (JS abuse by site owners) I wonder if it might be useful to set size limits, like: maximum allowed bytes per resource type (.js, .css, .*), per file and per page, possibly with some local-vs-remote adjustments. You could just read the Content-Length header and drop the connection if the site is over the user's limits (at which point you'd want to display a status message instead of the partial site).

gvb 9y ago

The sites that REALLY piss me off are the ones with a timed redirect like: <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1;url=http://www.example.com/nojavascript" http://www.example.com/nojavascript" /> which show a usable flash of the site for one second and then bounce me to a useless "You must enable JavaScript to use this site." page. By the flash I know that this is technically not correct.

angus-g 9y ago
NoScript includes a toggle to disable exactly this behaviour (meta tags within noscript tags). meta refreshes in general are pretty annoying as a user though

pier25 9y ago

1) It's irrelevant since it's the only language we have on the browser. 2) I think this is actually a cultural problem. Are users steering away from overcomplex/bloated/intrusive websites? If not, why not? 3) That's an argument similar to should a site support IE8? IMO it really boils down to the cost vs the benefit of supporting user without JS. And that of course will depend on your target users.

kalleboo 9y ago

One problem is that more and more, people expect the browsing experience to include a lot of responsive features that require a bunch of client-side JavaScript. Except JavaScript blows, the emerging JS extension ecosystem that tries to fix that is still highly in flux (and mostly blows), so developers try to keep their server-side stuff NOT JavaScript, and then supporting server-side rendering means re-implementing everything twice. Of course, this doesn't excuse document-centric sites like news and blogs.