6 ms·

People that are in the web since forever and understand how it works and complain about JS are the weirdest form of tech ludites there are. Such a weird line in

by vasco 5y ago

People that are in the web since forever and understand how it works and complain about JS are the weirdest form of tech ludites there are. Such a weird line in the sand.

thehta 5y ago
How is it weird? You literally go from > viewing text/parsing XML to > allowing remote sites to execute code on your machine, immediately when you load a site. That's quite a big jump, regardless of all the browser sandboxing.
- nl 5y ago
  HTML has never been XML. And HTML + CSS3 is Turing complete without Javascript anyway: https://accodeing.com/blog/2015/css3-proven-to-be-turing-complete https://accodeing.com/blog/2015/css3-proven-to-be-turing-com...
  - kitsune_ 5y ago
    Amen, I think if memory serves correctly HTML was SGML inspired and once XML became popular there was a XHTML standardization push for a brief time. I think you could argue that the ubiquity of HTML led to people see value in something like XML back in the late 90's / early 00' and HTML drove XML invention and adoption and not the other way around.
- jstummbillig 5y ago
  In a mere 20-ish years. Crazy.
  - diroussel 5y ago
    And how many years did HTML exist before JavaScript was invented?
    - jstummbillig 5y ago
      100000 years?
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Technically you already allow remote code execution via XSLT.
- afloatboat 5y ago
  I see people comment this on HN on a daily basis and it always boggles my mind. For me this reads as: 'This thing that was initially conceived years ago when computers were incapable of much more than display text should never evolve/change to take advantage of current capabilities'. Yes, initially the web could only display hyperlinked text. The same can be said for many technologies/inventions, should we therefore never expand the capabilities of our tools? What is the difference between the web and your operating system in that regard? Why are OS APIs so different? We can also look at the positive effect this evolution has had where what used to be platform specific tooling is now often simply available via a URL. I much prefer that over random executables that are not sandboxed and by default have full access to all your data. Yes, this can be mitigated, but the average user won't. No it's not all sunshine and roses, we've made trade-offs with regards to performance and UX among others, but this is still an ongoing process as the modern web is still relatively young and changing.
  - zelphirkalt 5y ago
    We have HTML and CSS, which evolved quite a lot and already allow for what 90% (estimate) of the websites do. Usually it is people using JS, where they should not and tracking from FAANG and others, which are the reason to block JS. You are painting a wrong picture there. If 95% of the web devs used JS in appropriate ways and it was not used so much for spying on people, well, then it would be a different story.
    - scrollaway 5y ago
      You say that, but even if all trackers disappeared today, everybody and their alt account would still be complaining on HN about javascript omnipresence, "why are you using React when you could do this serverside" and what not. (And if you agree with telling people they're doing their development wrong by using JS for anything less than an in-browser implementation of Starcraft, you're painting yourself as the arbiter of what is and isn't appropriate -- please don't.) Hating trackers is rational. The JS hate on HN, is not.
      - 5y ago
- exporectomy 5y ago
  You just restated the belief as if the reason is self-evident. What's the reason? Security? Even displaying a JPEG has had security vulnerabilities. You can't really seem to escape that just by not executing code. And no PDFs too, I guess, because they contain code?
  - _Algernon_ 5y ago
    Reducing the attack surface is the pragmatic thing to do and it just happens that js alone makes a several orders of magnitude difference on its own. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.
- kitsune_ 5y ago
  Yes, but JavaScript has been a thing since the 90's and was widely used by web sites even back in the the days of GeoCities. So it's really a bit weird to complain about something that has been part of the web since almost its beginnings, and arguably has been one of the main drivers for the 'rise of the web' itself.
throwawayswede 5y ago
You do realize those people you call weird mainly refuse to enable js by default because of the amount of tracking it imposes right? Not to mention those “designed” articles (the verge style) that load like 3 megs at least of a god awful amount of crappy slider libraries and crappy stuff? This is such a basic thing to refuse that what’s actually weird is that you find it weird.
- dwighttk 5y ago
  3 megs!? That won’t even fit on two of my floppy disks
  - dotancohen 5y ago
    I worked with someone not so long ago that was on a 750 KiB connection. I myself remember that speed at being blazingly fast at one point - so fast that we could start listening to a song before Kazaa finished downloading it. 3 megs of unnecessary data meant that he would sit 3 unnecessary minutes waiting for a page to load.
    - throwawayswede 5y ago
      I had a bad connection for the majority of my internet usage life. People don’t understand that excessive data loading is superfluous. But to call people who worry about that weird is truly strange to me.
      - daddylongstroke 5y ago
        Same here. I'm still on a 3Mb DSL connection, and to be quite honest, according to my graphs, it's closer to 196KB/sec. Why in the world would I enable JS when I mostly don't need to? I'm just trying to read text!
- chakkepolja 5y ago
  Not only tracking. For text sites it's just waste of bandwidth. And where I live internet is slow.
httpsterio 5y ago
I'm not that old nor opiniomated, but I dont think disabling JS for the majority of browsing is weird. I had a mid-tier Android phone phone (a 250 euros costing Nokia) that after a few years of use just simply crawled when using normal websites that were a bit JS heavy. I'm not even talking about react/vue SPA apps. Sites like the new Reddit design, Facebook, twitter etc. are just incredibly slow even on my beefy desktop and it its 100% because of how long the JS takes to execute. We're off loading the performance hit in developer experience and server side rendering to the end user at the cost of a crummier user experience with many websites these days that strictly wouldn't need JS for most of the functionality. I'm not happy about this trend.
jeffreygoesto 5y ago
No, it's not. These people know exactly what they want to avoid.
tyingq 5y ago
I don't run with JS disabled, but still hate things like a blog where the html is essentially empty and only filled with content via JS. The whole idea of articles, documents, and so on, for the web was semantic content held at a url, crosslinked to related semantic content, etc. I do understand the idea of SPAs, but not the idea that everything should be an SPA.
bogwog 5y ago
It's the kind of thing where you have to try it for yourself. No javascript == best user experience possible. * instant load times * stable performance * no tracking, and sometimes even no ads * no stupid animations that break scrolling, ask you to sign up for newsletters, etc * no hijacked back button, or disabled highlighting/copy/paste, or pop ups/unders Unless you're trying to play games, or use some complicated web application like an IDE, javascript offers absolutely nothing of value to you. It only exists to benefit the owner of the website. For 99.999% of web browsing use-cases, HTML/CSS is all that's needed. The only situation I can think of where javascript has the potential to offer an improved user experience is with infinite scrolling. That's personal preference though, so if it's something you value, I could understand wanting to enable javascript. (also, I just checked and noticed that Twitter refuses to work if you disable js. Fuck you, Twitter.)
- dewey 5y ago
  > No javascript == best user experience possible And yet in every thread there's at least one person complaining about the posted link not working with JS disabled.
  - bogwog 5y ago
    Of course, since that means the page requires javascript, and is thus providing an inferior user experience. Who wouldn't complain about that?
    - tiborsaas 5y ago
      Your comment reminds me of this good old meme: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/016/674/802.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/016/674/802... Sure, if you disable JS you'll have a worse experience, but it's your fault, not the site creators'.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- turbocon 5y ago

by vasco 5y ago

People that are in the web since forever and understand how it works and complain about JS are the weirdest form of tech ludites there are. Such a weird line in the sand.

thehta 5y ago

How is it weird? You literally go from > viewing text/parsing XML to > allowing remote sites to execute code on your machine, immediately when you load a site. That's quite a big jump, regardless of all the browser sandboxing.

nl 5y ago
HTML has never been XML. And HTML + CSS3 is Turing complete without Javascript anyway: https://accodeing.com/blog/2015/css3-proven-to-be-turing-complete https://accodeing.com/blog/2015/css3-proven-to-be-turing-com...
- kitsune_ 5y ago
  Amen, I think if memory serves correctly HTML was SGML inspired and once XML became popular there was a XHTML standardization push for a brief time. I think you could argue that the ubiquity of HTML led to people see value in something like XML back in the late 90's / early 00' and HTML drove XML invention and adoption and not the other way around.
jstummbillig 5y ago
In a mere 20-ish years. Crazy.
- diroussel 5y ago
  And how many years did HTML exist before JavaScript was invented?
  - jstummbillig 5y ago
    100000 years?
pjmlp 5y ago
Technically you already allow remote code execution via XSLT.
afloatboat 5y ago
I see people comment this on HN on a daily basis and it always boggles my mind. For me this reads as: 'This thing that was initially conceived years ago when computers were incapable of much more than display text should never evolve/change to take advantage of current capabilities'. Yes, initially the web could only display hyperlinked text. The same can be said for many technologies/inventions, should we therefore never expand the capabilities of our tools? What is the difference between the web and your operating system in that regard? Why are OS APIs so different? We can also look at the positive effect this evolution has had where what used to be platform specific tooling is now often simply available via a URL. I much prefer that over random executables that are not sandboxed and by default have full access to all your data. Yes, this can be mitigated, but the average user won't. No it's not all sunshine and roses, we've made trade-offs with regards to performance and UX among others, but this is still an ongoing process as the modern web is still relatively young and changing.
- zelphirkalt 5y ago
  We have HTML and CSS, which evolved quite a lot and already allow for what 90% (estimate) of the websites do. Usually it is people using JS, where they should not and tracking from FAANG and others, which are the reason to block JS. You are painting a wrong picture there. If 95% of the web devs used JS in appropriate ways and it was not used so much for spying on people, well, then it would be a different story.
  - scrollaway 5y ago
    You say that, but even if all trackers disappeared today, everybody and their alt account would still be complaining on HN about javascript omnipresence, "why are you using React when you could do this serverside" and what not. (And if you agree with telling people they're doing their development wrong by using JS for anything less than an in-browser implementation of Starcraft, you're painting yourself as the arbiter of what is and isn't appropriate -- please don't.) Hating trackers is rational. The JS hate on HN, is not.
    - 5y ago
exporectomy 5y ago
You just restated the belief as if the reason is self-evident. What's the reason? Security? Even displaying a JPEG has had security vulnerabilities. You can't really seem to escape that just by not executing code. And no PDFs too, I guess, because they contain code?
- _Algernon_ 5y ago
  Reducing the attack surface is the pragmatic thing to do and it just happens that js alone makes a several orders of magnitude difference on its own. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.
kitsune_ 5y ago
Yes, but JavaScript has been a thing since the 90's and was widely used by web sites even back in the the days of GeoCities. So it's really a bit weird to complain about something that has been part of the web since almost its beginnings, and arguably has been one of the main drivers for the 'rise of the web' itself.

throwawayswede 5y ago

You do realize those people you call weird mainly refuse to enable js by default because of the amount of tracking it imposes right? Not to mention those “designed” articles (the verge style) that load like 3 megs at least of a god awful amount of crappy slider libraries and crappy stuff? This is such a basic thing to refuse that what’s actually weird is that you find it weird.

dwighttk 5y ago
3 megs!? That won’t even fit on two of my floppy disks
- dotancohen 5y ago
  I worked with someone not so long ago that was on a 750 KiB connection. I myself remember that speed at being blazingly fast at one point - so fast that we could start listening to a song before Kazaa finished downloading it. 3 megs of unnecessary data meant that he would sit 3 unnecessary minutes waiting for a page to load.
  - throwawayswede 5y ago
    I had a bad connection for the majority of my internet usage life. People don’t understand that excessive data loading is superfluous. But to call people who worry about that weird is truly strange to me.
    - daddylongstroke 5y ago
      Same here. I'm still on a 3Mb DSL connection, and to be quite honest, according to my graphs, it's closer to 196KB/sec. Why in the world would I enable JS when I mostly don't need to? I'm just trying to read text!
chakkepolja 5y ago
Not only tracking. For text sites it's just waste of bandwidth. And where I live internet is slow.

httpsterio 5y ago

I'm not that old nor opiniomated, but I dont think disabling JS for the majority of browsing is weird. I had a mid-tier Android phone phone (a 250 euros costing Nokia) that after a few years of use just simply crawled when using normal websites that were a bit JS heavy. I'm not even talking about react/vue SPA apps. Sites like the new Reddit design, Facebook, twitter etc. are just incredibly slow even on my beefy desktop and it its 100% because of how long the JS takes to execute. We're off loading the performance hit in developer experience and server side rendering to the end user at the cost of a crummier user experience with many websites these days that strictly wouldn't need JS for most of the functionality. I'm not happy about this trend.

jeffreygoesto 5y ago

No, it's not. These people know exactly what they want to avoid.

tyingq 5y ago

I don't run with JS disabled, but still hate things like a blog where the html is essentially empty and only filled with content via JS. The whole idea of articles, documents, and so on, for the web was semantic content held at a url, crosslinked to related semantic content, etc. I do understand the idea of SPAs, but not the idea that everything should be an SPA.

bogwog 5y ago

It's the kind of thing where you have to try it for yourself. No javascript == best user experience possible. * instant load times * stable performance * no tracking, and sometimes even no ads * no stupid animations that break scrolling, ask you to sign up for newsletters, etc * no hijacked back button, or disabled highlighting/copy/paste, or pop ups/unders Unless you're trying to play games, or use some complicated web application like an IDE, javascript offers absolutely nothing of value to you. It only exists to benefit the owner of the website. For 99.999% of web browsing use-cases, HTML/CSS is all that's needed. The only situation I can think of where javascript has the potential to offer an improved user experience is with infinite scrolling. That's personal preference though, so if it's something you value, I could understand wanting to enable javascript. (also, I just checked and noticed that Twitter refuses to work if you disable js. Fuck you, Twitter.)

dewey 5y ago
> No javascript == best user experience possible And yet in every thread there's at least one person complaining about the posted link not working with JS disabled.
- bogwog 5y ago
  Of course, since that means the page requires javascript, and is thus providing an inferior user experience. Who wouldn't complain about that?
  - tiborsaas 5y ago
    Your comment reminds me of this good old meme: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/016/674/802.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/016/674/802... Sure, if you disable JS you'll have a worse experience, but it's your fault, not the site creators'.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
turbocon 5y ago