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JavaScript is amazing. Sure, there's issues, but the state of the web in 2020 is so much better than it was two decades ago. Yes, some sites abuse it... but abu

JavaScript is amazing. Sure, there's issues, but the state of the web in 2020 is so much better than it was two decades ago. Yes, some sites abuse it... but abusing web technologies is a time-honored tradition since the Internet started. People used to be tracked using 1x1 pixels or Flash. Don't blame the technology, blame people. We've seen so many amazing things become possible due to JavaScript. We can communicate and collaborate better than ever before. Even news sites, historically some of the biggest abusers of JS (with ads/tracking), have used JavaScript to build amazing data visualizations and tell stories in new and unique ways. The criteria for this "club" is so narrow, even Hacker News wouldn't even be eligible! Is that really what we should be striving for? Sure, sometimes JS has been abused. But Chrome/Firefox/Safari have done an amazing job of reigning in abuse and speeding it up, and I'm so excited about the crazy weird new things I get to build every day because web technologies have gotten so good.

0goel0 6y ago
"Javascript is good in some cases" is the point of this club. You can build great websites without the cruft. Secondly, JS abuse is now built into browsers, so yes no JS is a decent goal for privacy, security, and speed.
- krapp 6y ago
  >"Javascript is good in some cases" is the point of this club. The very first qualifier to join is "Make sure there is no Javascript on your website," not "make sure the Javascript on your site is necessary."
  - userbinator 6y ago
    The point of this is to specifically point out sites which do not need any JS at all.
pmoriarty 6y ago
The problem with javascript is not just abuse, it's overuse. There are countless websites which have no dynamic content and yet choose to require javascript to function. The other major problem is the vulnerabilities you open yourself up to by allowing javascript to run in your browser. 99.9% of the time it's simply not worth it for me, and I wish I could say "no thank you" to all those sites that use it but don't actually need it to deliver all their static content. Even many of the sites that deliver dynamic content via javascript could probably have been designed to work just fine without it, but no, companies just have to have their tracking and serve up all their ads via JS.
- userbinator 6y ago
  Even many of the sites that deliver dynamic content via javascript could probably have been designed to work just fine without it, but no, companies just have to have their tracking and serve up all their ads via JS. Two noteworthy examples on this are Twitter and YouTube, especially in their latest designs. 99% of their functionality could be accomplished without any JS, and thus be accessible from a very wide range of browsers, but they've turned into horribly wasteful SPAs that now require an extremely recent browser and accompanying dependent software --- and hardware --- to access. IMHO it's a huge waste of resources, and it's time this endless churn was put to a stop.
  - corty 6y ago
    SPAs like you described are the coal rollers of the software world. Kill the environment and fry your users laps, just because you can, not for any sensible reason. We need much more naming and shaming of this practice. Software needs to be more responsible with regards to the resources it consumes, especially if it does so without any apparent neccessity.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      If all the processing were on the server, this cost would be appropriately measured and monitored. Because it's on the client, and diffused over all users, it's essentially free to the producer, and hence gets much, much worse. As a good example, I remember how Facebook became much, much slower for me post React. This then spread across the web, leading to much pain for a really large amount of users, but counterbalanced by much pleasure for developers. It's funny how that worked out.
raspyberr 6y ago
I hate when a website with only text doesn't load because it requires JS.
aravindajju 6y ago
Exactly my thoughts. JavaScript has made the web a powerful platforms, which otherwise would have been infested with proprietary technologies like Flash, XAML, Applets etc., Because of what JavaScript brings on to the table, today we can think of building application on par with native applications. Bashing of JavaScript is unwarranted.
- Seirdy 6y ago
  Not all sites should leverage the features of this "powerful platform." A blog doesn't need to be an app. Every piece of complexity you add to something has a cost. Here's a list of ways people consume web content besides the web browsers most webdevs test on: - A phone in a train entering a tunnel. HTML loaded, but nothing else. - A computer on shared hotel Wi-Fi with a packet loss rate of 70%. - A browser with an addon that applies a dark theme to web pages by injecting a stylesheet - A browser with default background/foreground colors that aren't white/black - Braille readers - Screen readers - E-readers and webpage-to-epub converters - Browser reader-mode, or a host of 3rd-party reader-mode addons - Bookmarking services with article extractors (e.g. Pocket) - RSS readers - Printouts - Textual browsers: lynx, links, elinks, w3m - An old computer in the public library, running Firefox 23 - A niche OS with a custom browser you've never heard of - A browser that won't exist until the year 2028 - A mobile app you've never heard of - A link aggregator that displays previews of articles - A custom script that converts HTML to markdown and saves the markdown file for offline reading. Each of these is an edge case. Yet most users fit into a few edge cases. I have yet to meet a single person who isn't often inconvenienced by being an edge case. A simple site that uses HTML with some CSS properly automatically gets stellar cross-browser compatibility and accessibility. My site works well on everything from Firefox to lynx to screenreaders (I don't have a braille reader to test, but I suspect it should work well on one), and I didn't even have to try. If your train goes through a tunnel and only HTML loads, it'll still look just fine; CSS is an optional progressive enhancement. Every piece of tech you throw at a site makes some edge case fail. If there are multiple ways to deliver the features we need, we should choose the one that's the simplest, to avoid excluding more edge cases. If your website is a blog with formatted text, there's no reason to add JS and throw out all the edge cases that this could exclude. TLDR: Don't build a gingerbread house with construction equipment. Plenty of sites don't need to use future tech.
black_puppydog 6y ago
> some sites abuse it This might be the (tech) understatement of the year. Most sites I visit work just fine, or better, JS blocked. Which means they are ab-/overusing it.
Seirdy 6y ago
> The criteria for this "club" is so narrow, even Hacker News wouldn't even be eligible! Is that really what we should be striving for? No, it's what this club is striving for. This club isn't advocating for 100% of websites to be a part of it. It's encouraging an idea that could use a bit of love, not demanding it.

0goel0 6y ago

"Javascript is good in some cases" is the point of this club. You can build great websites without the cruft. Secondly, JS abuse is now built into browsers, so yes no JS is a decent goal for privacy, security, and speed.

krapp 6y ago
>"Javascript is good in some cases" is the point of this club. The very first qualifier to join is "Make sure there is no Javascript on your website," not "make sure the Javascript on your site is necessary."
- userbinator 6y ago
  The point of this is to specifically point out sites which do not need any JS at all.

pmoriarty 6y ago

The problem with javascript is not just abuse, it's overuse. There are countless websites which have no dynamic content and yet choose to require javascript to function. The other major problem is the vulnerabilities you open yourself up to by allowing javascript to run in your browser. 99.9% of the time it's simply not worth it for me, and I wish I could say "no thank you" to all those sites that use it but don't actually need it to deliver all their static content. Even many of the sites that deliver dynamic content via javascript could probably have been designed to work just fine without it, but no, companies just have to have their tracking and serve up all their ads via JS.

userbinator 6y ago
Even many of the sites that deliver dynamic content via javascript could probably have been designed to work just fine without it, but no, companies just have to have their tracking and serve up all their ads via JS. Two noteworthy examples on this are Twitter and YouTube, especially in their latest designs. 99% of their functionality could be accomplished without any JS, and thus be accessible from a very wide range of browsers, but they've turned into horribly wasteful SPAs that now require an extremely recent browser and accompanying dependent software --- and hardware --- to access. IMHO it's a huge waste of resources, and it's time this endless churn was put to a stop.
- corty 6y ago
  SPAs like you described are the coal rollers of the software world. Kill the environment and fry your users laps, just because you can, not for any sensible reason. We need much more naming and shaming of this practice. Software needs to be more responsible with regards to the resources it consumes, especially if it does so without any apparent neccessity.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    If all the processing were on the server, this cost would be appropriately measured and monitored. Because it's on the client, and diffused over all users, it's essentially free to the producer, and hence gets much, much worse. As a good example, I remember how Facebook became much, much slower for me post React. This then spread across the web, leading to much pain for a really large amount of users, but counterbalanced by much pleasure for developers. It's funny how that worked out.

raspyberr 6y ago

I hate when a website with only text doesn't load because it requires JS.

aravindajju 6y ago

Exactly my thoughts. JavaScript has made the web a powerful platforms, which otherwise would have been infested with proprietary technologies like Flash, XAML, Applets etc., Because of what JavaScript brings on to the table, today we can think of building application on par with native applications. Bashing of JavaScript is unwarranted.

Seirdy 6y ago
Not all sites should leverage the features of this "powerful platform." A blog doesn't need to be an app. Every piece of complexity you add to something has a cost. Here's a list of ways people consume web content besides the web browsers most webdevs test on: - A phone in a train entering a tunnel. HTML loaded, but nothing else. - A computer on shared hotel Wi-Fi with a packet loss rate of 70%. - A browser with an addon that applies a dark theme to web pages by injecting a stylesheet - A browser with default background/foreground colors that aren't white/black - Braille readers - Screen readers - E-readers and webpage-to-epub converters - Browser reader-mode, or a host of 3rd-party reader-mode addons - Bookmarking services with article extractors (e.g. Pocket) - RSS readers - Printouts - Textual browsers: lynx, links, elinks, w3m - An old computer in the public library, running Firefox 23 - A niche OS with a custom browser you've never heard of - A browser that won't exist until the year 2028 - A mobile app you've never heard of - A link aggregator that displays previews of articles - A custom script that converts HTML to markdown and saves the markdown file for offline reading. Each of these is an edge case. Yet most users fit into a few edge cases. I have yet to meet a single person who isn't often inconvenienced by being an edge case. A simple site that uses HTML with some CSS properly automatically gets stellar cross-browser compatibility and accessibility. My site works well on everything from Firefox to lynx to screenreaders (I don't have a braille reader to test, but I suspect it should work well on one), and I didn't even have to try. If your train goes through a tunnel and only HTML loads, it'll still look just fine; CSS is an optional progressive enhancement. Every piece of tech you throw at a site makes some edge case fail. If there are multiple ways to deliver the features we need, we should choose the one that's the simplest, to avoid excluding more edge cases. If your website is a blog with formatted text, there's no reason to add JS and throw out all the edge cases that this could exclude. TLDR: Don't build a gingerbread house with construction equipment. Plenty of sites don't need to use future tech.

black_puppydog 6y ago

> some sites abuse it This might be the (tech) understatement of the year. Most sites I visit work just fine, or better, JS blocked. Which means they are ab-/overusing it.

Seirdy 6y ago

> The criteria for this "club" is so narrow, even Hacker News wouldn't even be eligible! Is that really what we should be striving for? No, it's what this club is striving for. This club isn't advocating for 100% of websites to be a part of it. It's encouraging an idea that could use a bit of love, not demanding it.