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Anything that uses JavaScript? Or allows only the minimal subset required to implement AJAX type functionality. The argument for expanding web standards has a
by ethbro 9y ago
Anything that uses JavaScript?
Or allows only the minimal subset required to implement AJAX type functionality.
The argument for expanding web standards has always been "if we don't, then they'll just appify it and we won't have any say" (see DRM debate).
An explicit decoupling of information from interactivity would lessen the pressure for that.
- krapp 9y ago"Anything that uses Javascript" would include, as I said, almost the entire web, including sites which primarily serve text and act as documents, including Hacker News. View the source - it even uses AJAX.
- librexpr 9y agoI've just replied to you with JS disabled. I also created this account with no JS (this was a year ago). Upvoting also works without JS. In my experience, of all the websites that don't work without JS, only a minority actually need it. Most of the time it's silly things like articles and blog posts that just show a blank screen without JS, or drop-down menus that rely on JS even though there are perfectly fine non-JS ways to do it, etc.
- walterstucco 9y agoYou can live without electricity if you want. It's not really necessary I bet most of the things we do today with electric tools can be done without
- c22 9y ago"Anything that requires JavaScript" might be a better criteria. Hn gracefully falls back without JavaScript enabled because it's not necessary, just some added convenience.
- krapp 9y agoEven then, sites which lack graceful degradation aren't so qualitatively different from the few that do that they need to be moved to an entirely different platform, viewed from a different device and considered "applications" and not "documents." That seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What does make sense to me is a new platform based on WASM, with related tooling. Photoshop in the browser or something running the Unreal Engine or .Net is not the web enough to maybe deserve its own thing. But a new platform based on what are essentially complaints about complexity or efficiency would be too messy.
- ethbro 9y agoYes. Right now there's next to zero incentive not to use JavaScript. And only slightly more to engineer a working fallback page. Bifurcating the web would provide one.
- krapp 9y agoYou're arguing for a technical solution to what is essentially a cultural problem.
- ethbro 9y agoI'd argue that the cultural problem (sites being VM-tech-heavy) is caused by a technology choice (never saying "this much technology is sufficient for a large part of the web"). Or to put it another way, extrapolated down this path README.txt files on the web in the future will only be accessible with a pair of VR goggles.
- closeparen 9y agoA document is static. It's neither necessary nor desirable that we access documents over the internet by contacting their owners. It's better for both privacy and resilience to handle documents over something like IPFS. The web as we know it is much better suited to applications, where websites have behavior as well as content. Whether the rendering is server-side like HN or client-side like Facebook is irrelevant.