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Ask HN: Can we just agree on showing HTML without requiring JavaScript?

• trog 5y ago
  Weird how some giant companies that sell ads for a living invented these JavaScript frameworks that render sites totally unusable when JavaScript is disabled
• forgotmypw17 5y ago
  As I've commented elsewhere, I've found no-JS accessibility (as well as cookie and newsletter modals) to be great gatekeepers for low-quality content. At some point, I've noticed a strong correlation between low-value content which was a waste of my time to read and these accessibility anti-patterns, so now I just close the tab and read the comments instead. On the rare occasion I want to access the content despite these roadblocks, I use a proxy service.
• baash05 5y ago
  - About 2% of users have JS turned off (in the US) - About 1.7% of people have horses (in the US) Can we agree it makes as much sense to add horse friendly paths to the side of all the roads in the US, as it does to add JS friendly paths to web sites?
  • baash05 5y ago
    Building a road without a horse track is just bad engineering.
  • baash05 5y ago
    Building a parking lot without a horse pole and water pale. Is silly. It's rejecting X percent of your clients.
  • baash05 5y ago
    Building a road without a horse track is bad management and the engineers are lazy.
  • baash05 5y ago
    Roads should fail gracefully. Allow those without cars to ride horses.
• mrspeaker 5y ago
  I use this as a productivity tool: See something interesting on HN, click the link... it's a blank page. Close the page, do something else. Often I remember I'm procrastinating and use it as the bell to get back to working on my side projects. Even if I'm happily time-wasting - there's a heck of a lot of stuff on the web, no need for dealing with sub-standard websites!
  • hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
    Yeah, I do the same - if it's not a web app but an article, I see no reason to unblock JS just to read it. I believe this is the only way - nobody forces us to read articles blocked by JS, we can just choose not to visit such websites.
• News-Dog 5y ago
  > browsing with JS and cookies disabled Same, I would prefer to use https://nitter.net https://nitter.net front-end, rather than https://twitter.com https://twitter.com eg. https://nitter.net/pastebin/status/1250847990131986432 https://nitter.net/pastebin/status/1250847990131986432 vs https://twitter.com/pastebin/status/1250847990131986432 https://twitter.com/pastebin/status/1250847990131986432
  • Semaphor 5y ago
    I can recommend https://github.com/SimonBrazell/nitter-redirect https://github.com/SimonBrazell/nitter-redirect
• blunte 5y ago
  I think it should not be an all or nothing proposition. A little js for the right reason can be valuable. If we could instruct our browsers to use some budget constraints, such as max js size, max number of network requests, and max time, it would force site designers to reign in the unnecessary bulk.
  • chmod775 5y ago
    >it would force site designers to reign in the unnecessary bulk. Many sites are already near unusable on "low-specced" hardware that is used by about 80% of the world population, but most "software engineers" (I'm using that term really loosely here) don't care. My admittedly old but maxed out T440s chokes on twitch.tv. A good chunk of the world population still uses hardware that is considerably worse. It's no wonder that some western sites have problems penetrating other markets - their competition loads in the blink of an eye on my machine, while twitch has trouble even becoming interactive within 5 seconds. At this point I use underpowered hardware on purpose, because if my T440s can't adequately run our application or the build takes too long, then I know we have a problem.
  • zauguin 5y ago
    I really don't expect a page to work perfectly without JS. If some small feature uses it that's perfectly fine. But if I visit a page with JS disabled, I want these features using it to be broken and not the entire page to be unusable... A little JS for the right reason can be very valuable, but requiring JS just to get a minimally usable page is insane.
• jzellis 5y ago
  Maybe if the kids still remembered how to write html in a text editor without needing frameworks and fucking transpilers and bundlers. My first site was written with Notepad. Back then we just uploaded stuff to the server with FTP and we liked it! :-D
  • easrng 5y ago
    Hello, I probably qualify as one of "the kids" and I use notepad++ (on Windows), nano (on Linux systems without GUI), and featherpad (On my laptop with KDE) to do a bunch of my dev work. I don't tend to use frameworks and I just made some tweaks to my site today specifically to make it look better in Mosaic 2. I don't think I've ever actually used FTP though, my site is on Cloudflare workers cus it's free and doesn't have much downtime, but most of the rest of my stuff is on Github Pages or my VPS (I just edit directly on it when I need to make changes).
    • easrng 5y ago
      Though there are some things you need JS for, mainly cryptography and fun hacky things like this: data:text/html,<script>google={visualization:{Query:{setResponse:o=>document.write(atob(o.table.rows.map(e=>e.c[0].v).join("")))}}}</script><script%20src="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SOK9rEPrVLId1NR4KM-mgDO7tlmRk2K5nNi0tv-9gCY/gviz/tq?tqx=out:json"></script> If you go there, it will allow you to get Tor bridges without sending requests anywhere other than docs.google.com. Useful for getting around Fortinet.
• 0xy 5y ago
  You are an extreme minority, and often any other visitor to a website who "looks like" you are malicious. Why would anyone invest significant engineering time to placate a userbase that's far far smaller than Internet Explorer 10 usage?
  • dynom 5y ago
    Because it costs more time to not do it. Because seo and all other reasons. I suspect it's rather lack of knowledge than truly a deliberate choice
    • 0xy 5y ago
      >seo Google's crawler uses automated modern Chrome instances. Suggesting SEO isn't possible with JavaScript or can't index a React or Vue website is very, very outdated advice.
  • bArray 5y ago
    > You are an extreme minority, and often any other visitor to a website who "looks like" you are malicious. Not really, a significant amount of the world browse the internet with a bandwidth marginally better than dial-up. A significant amount of the world browses the internet via something barely passable as a smartphone. A significant amount of the world do not have < 200ms ping. > Why would anyone invest significant engineering time to placate a userbase that's far far smaller than Internet Explorer 10 usage? The sort of person that can run a website and use a JS framework should not find static HTML a 'significant' effort. It could most definitely be automated. Other points: 1. Increase accessibility. JS users will not be affected by not having JS. Your random JS will not always render the same. That CDN you link to might not be accessible everywhere. 2. Decrease bandwidth. Instead of just the content (and a little markup), you now have to load content + JS. 3. Decrease computation. The majority of the world accesses the internet through some device running on a battery. Instead of forcing all of those people to render your site individually, it makes tonnes more sense to render it once on the server end.
    • baash05 5y ago
• epolanski 5y ago
  Can we go back to a simpler time when cars weren't media centers?
• notapenny 5y ago
  No, we can't. We can't agree on your stance, because other people have different stances. You may have some reason why you want JS and cookies disabled, but many people don't. JS has been a part of the internet for as long as I've been alive. Sure, it's being used different and sometimes needlessly as with the blog you noted, but it's here and it's not going anywhere. If you want the web to be cookieless and JS-less, you can disable them. But the web is not cookieless and JS-less. You get the experience you want. You can't expect everyone to want that experience.
  • JohnFen 5y ago
    Whatever happened to the notion that web pages should fail gracefully? That is, they should be able to function in the absence of JS and cookies. Perhaps not fully functional or as pretty, but they should work. I've long considered websites that fail to do this to be poorly engineered.
    • sofixa 5y ago
      It went away when not having JS enabled stop being a regular thing ( what, 2010? At the latest!). Before that there were users with very old browsers, or asinine corporate "security" policies that didn't have JS; nowadays it's only luddites longing for HTML-only websites ( we must have lived in different times because those were just terrible to read, especially if you had a nonstandard (for the developer) screen size), aka a negligible amount of internet users. It's a pretty safe bet to not even test what happens when JS is enabled.
      • JohnFen 5y ago
        Which is very poor engineering. It also walls an increasing amount of the web off from those of us who reject JS because of the security risks it brings.
        • baash05 5y ago
          It walls an increasing amount of the web off from a really small and ever decreasing amount of people. I'd actually say it's good engineering. If I engineer a small gas can (for filling my lawn mower) I can build one that holds a gallon, or one that holds 5 gallons. Now 2% of the population that owns lawn mowers have massive yards and riding mowers. So which one do I engineer? Which do I build. I build for the 98% Optimist says cup is half full Pessimist says cup is half empty Engineer says cup is twice the size it has to be. The reality. Building for the 2% just isn't an effective use of resources. -- Oh oh.. I got a better one.. -- How many bridges in your home town have allowance for horses. Are all the bridge builders bad engineers?
• kkfx 5y ago
  I absolutely agree. My own personal website have no js, well usable with links, eww, w3m etc BUT most people do not care, for most a Mb+ webpage is nothing strange and they do not care about privacy and safety. Just try to see how many use a modern WebVM [1] without limiting it's access to system resources (firejail, bubblewrap, capsicum, ...). [1] those things too many call "browsers" for legacy reasons
• chrismsimpson 5y ago
  The modern HTML spec assumes JS predictability as part of its parsing state machine.
• gregjor 5y ago
  No, that train has left the station. We can’t agree to go back to riding horses to work instead of cars or churning our own butter either. I have the same reaction you describe — why does a site site use so much Javascript to display a page that could be plain HTML? But try pushing that idea to customers and bosses and their marketing teams and advertisers. Even sadder is I talk to more and more people calling themselves front-end developers who can’t write plain HTML and CSS and have no clue how HTTP works. For them web front-end means React (or whatever the flavor is this month).
• bArray 5y ago
  I go further - if you want me to interact with your content regularly, add an RSS feed (or some other notifications system). I will _not_ remember to check your website on a regular basis, no matter how good the content is. Almost all of these JS websites do not have an RSS feed. This all reminds me of the days when a whole website was an Adobe Flash application. It wasn't good then and it isn't good now.
  • sys_64738 5y ago
    Agree about RSS as I use it to find all articles. Sites without RSS don’t get remembered. shrug
  • kevincox 5y ago
    And if you don't provide a <link> for auto-discovery of the feed my chances of subscribing drop dramatically. Unless I think your content is especially good I'm not hunting around your site to find out where you stuck the tiny RSS logo.
• rudasn 5y ago
  On mobile, in the EU, the Web is unbearable so I mostly use Chrome with JS disabled with very few exceptions. When I care enough about the content I open the page with either Firefox or DDG. Then again I know I'm an exception, as I don't socialise or do anything fun online (anymore) or seek for cool stuff - just boring text only articles from HN and news.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• JCWasmx86 5y ago
  Yes. If your site requires JS for one of the following things, it is simply broken: - Video - Plain-Text - Images - Sometimes forms HTML provides everything you could need in the huge majority of cases.
• recursivedoubts 5y ago
  I would recommend evangelizing and working on HTML-bridges to this: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ Asking people to not require javascript is like asking them to not use cell phones: yes, it would probably be better in many ways but it's not happening.
• reaperducer 5y ago
  Web sites can function well with both Javascript, and without Javascript. But programmers and companies have to want to do that. Apple is a good example. It's often accused (especially on HN) of having a web site that is long on flash and short on substance. It's a massive company constantly trying to separate people from their money. Guess what? apple.com works fine without Javascript. And it still looks good. Even the pages flogging the latest phones and computers. Almost any company can do the same. It just takes good managers, and good programmers. But both of those are in short supply these days.
  • baash05 5y ago
    Takes time and dev's aren't cheep. Best coder in the world has to feed their family. Best managers in the world have to feed their coders. Devs and managers could. But (as a web dev) why bother. - 1.7 percent of responding households reporting horse ownership (US) - should we call road builders bad at their job because we don't include horse friendly tracks. - Can you imagine a city manager asking for more horse friendly roads in your city? It's 1.7% after all.
    • reaperducer 5y ago
      Can you imagine a city manager asking for more horse friendly roads in your city? Perhaps you just have very limited experience, or don't travel, or something, but in the last two major cities (1.5m+) I've lived in, yes, I can imagine that. And in the previous one, horse trials were being added all the time. We build municipal skateboarding facilities all the time, and in the U.S., only 2% of people are into that. Ditto for frisbee golf, which is only 0.33% of Americans. More to the point — What you describe is just an excuse for the whole "why bother" laziness and race to the bottom that's gotten the internet into the mess it's in today. "Good enough" almost never is.
• daqhris 5y ago
  Well, that's an individual decision; its free software after all. There is a myriad of devs and more entering the field constantly. I think it would be easier to invent a new programming language or a browsing engine than having a general consesus on what you are proposing.
• rado 5y ago
  Yes please. Browsers need to add much more to CSS to avoid JS for simple things like powerful calc() (with attribute values, more math etc), vertical rhythm and so on.
• tmikaeld 5y ago
  You can't even buy online without JS because card collection (HTML forms) requires PCI Certification, which is expensive and the majority of merchants can't afford it.
• BryanLunduke 5y ago
  "Can we just agree on letting basic html do it's thing? Why insist on JS to be able to show simple text on webpage?" Preach it, brotha!