7 ms·

I would suppose the above user is referring, rather snidely, to GitHub not loading commit information without JavaScript. GitHub's JavaScript use is really quit

I would suppose the above user is referring, rather snidely, to GitHub not loading commit information without JavaScript. GitHub's JavaScript use is really quite minimal, and certainly nothing like GitLab.

userbinator 6y ago
The fact that it used to work perfectly fine without JS is proof enough that it don't need it. But I guess the average web deviloper is more concerned with stuffing one's resume with the latest fads than real accessibility and efficiency.
- p1necone 6y ago
  You seem to be using a different definition of accessibility than the commonly accepted one. What disability precludes the use of javascript?
  - userbinator 6y ago
    Accessibilty and disability are related but not the same. Making a website more accessible is beneficial to everyone, not only those with disabilities.
    - p1necone 6y ago
      You're arguing semantics. The web development community (and the engineering industry as a whole) uses the term "accessibility" to refer to making things usable by people with disabilities (and has done so for decades). Pretending that people understand the term to mean a different thing, and then screeching at them for not doing that how you want them to is intellectually dishonest and just makes you look like an asshole.
      - userbinator 6y ago
        I'm talking about the original definition of accessibility, not the one the "community" decided to pervert for its own interests: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/accessibility https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/accessibility The quality of being accessible, or of admitting approach; receptiveness As another link posted elsewhere in here shows, it seems accessibility has turned from striving to make sites more accessible to everyone, to doing the bare minimum legally required by disability laws.
        user-the-name 6y ago
        There are more people with disabilities than there are people who intentionally turn off Javascript. And those with disabilities don't have them by choice. To be honest, stop whining and deal with the consequences of your own personal choices.
        userbinator 6y ago
        No, how about you and the rest of them stop trying to turn the Internet into Google's personal playground.
        user-the-name 6y ago
        That is quite a leap of logic there.
        userbinator 6y ago
        If you read the rest of my comments, perhaps you would understand. Google is a plague upon the Internet.
- viraptor 6y ago
  Please take a step back for a moment and imagine that you're one of the blind users of HN running into this comment. Reading that GitHub devs who took the time to actually support some assistive technology on their website (not sure how well, but see the existing aria attributes in the source) and track their support (https://government.github.com/accessibility/ https://government.github.com/accessibility/) don't care about "real accessibility" by not catering to what technology choices you prefer.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    If they had actually used a sane approach, I bet their accessibility score would be even higher, and even fewer people would be complaining.
- pkage 6y ago
  There's a lot of hostility on HN towards web developers. "Real accessibility" doesn't really have much to do with Javascript or not, it has everything to do with ensuring the site is screen reader accessible, ensuring the site is available for low-vision users, and ensuring that the site is available at slow bandwidths. Given that the site caters to those already (good kb navigation, stated future support for color-blindness, and the site is ~300kb/page) I think that they're in pretty good shape. Ultimately, choosing not to run JS is your decision—but a vanishingly small percentage of users choose to do that, and as a company your focus is on providing features for the product, and not supporting every single user and their unique configurations. Should Github explicitly support terminal-based browsers like Lynx as well? Plus, you can avoid 99% of the github website just by using git from the command line (or your favorite client) and using their CLI tool for repo creation/etc.
  - arderary 6y ago
    I really don't understand the glorification of no-js websites on HN. Like, I'd get it if it was Flash or something ('cause that definitely has some real accessibility issues, and required a plugin to be installed), but the web platform is HTML, CSS and JS. Why artificially limit yourself to just two? It seems to have become a matter of pride to say "works without JS", for absolutely no practical reason (it's not like removing JS is some silver bullet for accessibility, no-js sites can and do still absolutely have problems with accessibility)
    - httpsterio 6y ago
      JS is usually what kills performance on lower end devices. If websites were only html and css, my smartphone from 2015 would still be a functional device. I have yet to have a page crash due to too poorly written html and css.
      - boogies 6y ago
        A great example of this: compare Sourcehut to GitHub or any software forge that requires JS. https://forgeperf.org/ https://forgeperf.org/
- fooey 6y ago
  The idea that the web should work without JS has been dead for a couple decades now. It's a barely less laughable demand than expecting everyone to use a CLI over a GUI.
  - sneak 6y ago
    That's not true. The idea that the web should gracefully degrade and continue to display content in browsers of all types has been live for... the entire existence of the web. There is a new trend to expect all clients to run js, yes, but that is a bad assumption.
    - fooey 6y ago
      I understand that is an ideal, but "browsers of all types" is utterly unrealistic, and hasn't been the case in the wild since the 90's. Not only does the modern web expect you to be running JS, you're expected to be running a browser that's at most 1 version off the most recently released version. Supporting only evergreen browsers might just be the best thing that's happened in web development. Graceful degradation was a thing for a very brief period in the lifetime of the web, and hardly anyone actually had the resources or inclination to even pretend to attempt it.
      - echelon 6y ago
        We got conned into this shitty world where HTML shovels ajax and giant JS payloads. Old web was information and a theme could be written locally and applied to everything. New web is almost as trashy as the App Store. edit: my imagination is vivid, and it doesn't end at React and the iPhone. We can do so much better. Semantic information markup without ads and presentation details. Shared p2p, unsiloed. Completely free.
      - sneak 6y ago
        I browse the "modern web" with js off by default, and much of it still works fine. The only part that doesn't, which saddens me, is that there is no way to do U2F auth without js.
- sellyme 6y ago
  "real accessibility" predominantly involves making it possible for people with disabilities to use a website, it's not about accommodating people who put a blindfold on and complain that it's difficult to see.
- userbinator 6y ago
  Holy bloody hell, what the fuck!!! Keep on downvoting me, I don't give a shit. The way these comments are going is proof that "accessibility" is no longer about actually making things accessible to as many people as possible with all sorts of different user-agents, but about bootlicking a tiny restricted definition of it so these fucking dipshit companies - mainly Google, but others are complicit too - can continue to enslave everyone even more with their enroaching Chrome-isation of the Internet. I don't want to use your spyware user-hostile browser, I am not going to "upgrade" my software or hardware, I don't want to run gobs of arbitrary code JUST TO VIEW AN ONLINE FILE EXPLORER! Stop breaking what used to work! Fuck this "modern" web and everything it stands for!!! Edit: -4 now. Looks like these "devilopers" just keep coming out of the woodwork... I wonder who pays you to push your agenda...
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I don't understand that to be honest, commit information is fairly static, and we've been building semi-dynamic pages server-side for decades now. At their size they could probably - and probably do - have an in-memory cache for commits + basic information for super fast access.
FrozenVoid 6y ago
Github uses web-components which are not supported by old browsers. All dynamic menus don't work without polyfill extension(which takes 100% CPU due some bug after awhile), basic functionality like creating/modifying files works right now but there is no guarantee github wouldn't break it.

userbinator 6y ago

The fact that it used to work perfectly fine without JS is proof enough that it don't need it. But I guess the average web deviloper is more concerned with stuffing one's resume with the latest fads than real accessibility and efficiency.

p1necone 6y ago
You seem to be using a different definition of accessibility than the commonly accepted one. What disability precludes the use of javascript?
- userbinator 6y ago
  Accessibilty and disability are related but not the same. Making a website more accessible is beneficial to everyone, not only those with disabilities.
  - p1necone 6y ago
    You're arguing semantics. The web development community (and the engineering industry as a whole) uses the term "accessibility" to refer to making things usable by people with disabilities (and has done so for decades). Pretending that people understand the term to mean a different thing, and then screeching at them for not doing that how you want them to is intellectually dishonest and just makes you look like an asshole.
    - userbinator 6y ago
      I'm talking about the original definition of accessibility, not the one the "community" decided to pervert for its own interests: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/accessibility https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/accessibility The quality of being accessible, or of admitting approach; receptiveness As another link posted elsewhere in here shows, it seems accessibility has turned from striving to make sites more accessible to everyone, to doing the bare minimum legally required by disability laws.
      - user-the-name 6y ago
        There are more people with disabilities than there are people who intentionally turn off Javascript. And those with disabilities don't have them by choice. To be honest, stop whining and deal with the consequences of your own personal choices.
        userbinator 6y ago
        No, how about you and the rest of them stop trying to turn the Internet into Google's personal playground.
        user-the-name 6y ago
        That is quite a leap of logic there.
        userbinator 6y ago
        If you read the rest of my comments, perhaps you would understand. Google is a plague upon the Internet.
viraptor 6y ago
Please take a step back for a moment and imagine that you're one of the blind users of HN running into this comment. Reading that GitHub devs who took the time to actually support some assistive technology on their website (not sure how well, but see the existing aria attributes in the source) and track their support (https://government.github.com/accessibility/ https://government.github.com/accessibility/) don't care about "real accessibility" by not catering to what technology choices you prefer.
- userbinator 6y ago
  If they had actually used a sane approach, I bet their accessibility score would be even higher, and even fewer people would be complaining.
pkage 6y ago
There's a lot of hostility on HN towards web developers. "Real accessibility" doesn't really have much to do with Javascript or not, it has everything to do with ensuring the site is screen reader accessible, ensuring the site is available for low-vision users, and ensuring that the site is available at slow bandwidths. Given that the site caters to those already (good kb navigation, stated future support for color-blindness, and the site is ~300kb/page) I think that they're in pretty good shape. Ultimately, choosing not to run JS is your decision—but a vanishingly small percentage of users choose to do that, and as a company your focus is on providing features for the product, and not supporting every single user and their unique configurations. Should Github explicitly support terminal-based browsers like Lynx as well? Plus, you can avoid 99% of the github website just by using git from the command line (or your favorite client) and using their CLI tool for repo creation/etc.
- arderary 6y ago
  I really don't understand the glorification of no-js websites on HN. Like, I'd get it if it was Flash or something ('cause that definitely has some real accessibility issues, and required a plugin to be installed), but the web platform is HTML, CSS and JS. Why artificially limit yourself to just two? It seems to have become a matter of pride to say "works without JS", for absolutely no practical reason (it's not like removing JS is some silver bullet for accessibility, no-js sites can and do still absolutely have problems with accessibility)
  - httpsterio 6y ago
    JS is usually what kills performance on lower end devices. If websites were only html and css, my smartphone from 2015 would still be a functional device. I have yet to have a page crash due to too poorly written html and css.
    - boogies 6y ago
      A great example of this: compare Sourcehut to GitHub or any software forge that requires JS. https://forgeperf.org/ https://forgeperf.org/
fooey 6y ago
The idea that the web should work without JS has been dead for a couple decades now. It's a barely less laughable demand than expecting everyone to use a CLI over a GUI.
- sneak 6y ago
  That's not true. The idea that the web should gracefully degrade and continue to display content in browsers of all types has been live for... the entire existence of the web. There is a new trend to expect all clients to run js, yes, but that is a bad assumption.
  - fooey 6y ago
    I understand that is an ideal, but "browsers of all types" is utterly unrealistic, and hasn't been the case in the wild since the 90's. Not only does the modern web expect you to be running JS, you're expected to be running a browser that's at most 1 version off the most recently released version. Supporting only evergreen browsers might just be the best thing that's happened in web development. Graceful degradation was a thing for a very brief period in the lifetime of the web, and hardly anyone actually had the resources or inclination to even pretend to attempt it.
    - echelon 6y ago
      We got conned into this shitty world where HTML shovels ajax and giant JS payloads. Old web was information and a theme could be written locally and applied to everything. New web is almost as trashy as the App Store. edit: my imagination is vivid, and it doesn't end at React and the iPhone. We can do so much better. Semantic information markup without ads and presentation details. Shared p2p, unsiloed. Completely free.
    - sneak 6y ago
      I browse the "modern web" with js off by default, and much of it still works fine. The only part that doesn't, which saddens me, is that there is no way to do U2F auth without js.
sellyme 6y ago
"real accessibility" predominantly involves making it possible for people with disabilities to use a website, it's not about accommodating people who put a blindfold on and complain that it's difficult to see.
userbinator 6y ago
Holy bloody hell, what the fuck!!! Keep on downvoting me, I don't give a shit. The way these comments are going is proof that "accessibility" is no longer about actually making things accessible to as many people as possible with all sorts of different user-agents, but about bootlicking a tiny restricted definition of it so these fucking dipshit companies - mainly Google, but others are complicit too - can continue to enslave everyone even more with their enroaching Chrome-isation of the Internet. I don't want to use your spyware user-hostile browser, I am not going to "upgrade" my software or hardware, I don't want to run gobs of arbitrary code JUST TO VIEW AN ONLINE FILE EXPLORER! Stop breaking what used to work! Fuck this "modern" web and everything it stands for!!! Edit: -4 now. Looks like these "devilopers" just keep coming out of the woodwork... I wonder who pays you to push your agenda...

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

I don't understand that to be honest, commit information is fairly static, and we've been building semi-dynamic pages server-side for decades now. At their size they could probably - and probably do - have an in-memory cache for commits + basic information for super fast access.

FrozenVoid 6y ago

Github uses web-components which are not supported by old browsers. All dynamic menus don't work without polyfill extension(which takes 100% CPU due some bug after awhile), basic functionality like creating/modifying files works right now but there is no guarantee github wouldn't break it.