4 ms·

> people...who would like to disable JS, but it's just not practical As I tell my kid when he "wants" something, I want a pony, and a million dollars. I don't

by xp84 3y ago

> people...who would like to disable JS, but it's just not practical As I tell my kid when he "wants" something, I want a pony, and a million dollars. I don't see why the fact that some people might like that matters. I mean, given the choice for free sure I'd "like" it too. But it will never remotely be worth it to build two entirely separate web applications for every website to make that dream a reality, nor do I see the whole Internet agreeing to discard the decades of advancements in FE technologies to go back to script-free HTML. All that said, boy would that be a great jobs program for developers over age 35 though! Imagine developing for the web with no Webpack, no JS compilers, transpilers, bundles.[1] [1]: Or whatever you frontend folks use for your toolchain this year, or this nanosecond...

naikrovek 3y ago
why do you want a pony? they don't grow into full-size horses and they eat a lot and poop a lot.
john_the_writer 3y ago
Actually rails hides much of that now. Passing html over the wire is super easy, and I never give JS a second thought.
fullspectrumdev 3y ago
> decades of advancements in FE technologies to go back to script-free HTML. I don’t think modern webshit which requires downloading megabytes and megabytes of obfuscated code to view someone’s blog is an “advancement” for anyone except the adtech bastards.
j1elo 3y ago
Look. I agree with you, in the core idea. There have really been advances in technology, but for each step made with brilliance and prowess, there have been 3 steps back with laziness and carelessness. Some applications of the newer technologies merit their use. Most use cases, however, don't. Bad practices abound, the "art" of programming becomes a chore made by let's say not very skilled people. Luckily there are still lots of good managers and good devs that value adequately done products, but on average that's not the case and the Web gets more and more bloated as a whole. One day you decide to disable JavaScript in your phone (which BTW is an incredible way to speed up modern webshit, as the sibling comment puts it, in under-powered mobile devices), and turns out that lots of f*ing blogs don't load their plain text and static pictures if JS is not enabled. That's an absurd situation we've collectively ended up in. The mere thought of having a Word document with just text, images, and a couple tables, and not being able to open it if VB macros were disabled, sounds absurd. But that's exactly what large parts of the Web have become.
- skinner927 3y ago
  Your complain is conflated. Turning off javascript is not akin to turning off macros in a Word document. It’s like deleting your desktop environment and complaining Word doesn’t work in a terminal. I’m not sure if you’re really thinking about the impact of not having any javascript. Want to reply to a comment on HN? The whole page reloads. Want to upvote a comment? The whole page reloads. Sure you can give every comment an ID and reload back to where you were, but then you can’t have collapsible comments (because css, presumably what you’re hacking for collapsible comments without JS, can’t respond to anchor references). There’s a million other usability things that require JS, it’s so much more than a macro language. There are bad practices everywhere, in every field, and it feels like everyone feels they have the authority to beat down JS, and web dev as a whole, likely with zero experience working with it. Web arguably has the best developer experience of any field. It’s so good, they took the web and put it in your desktop. Electron, GTK, KDE, everything is javascript. The war is lost and over. Start arguing/discussing how JS can be improved instead that it shouldn’t exist (there’s PLENTY to complain about, don’t get me wrong).
  - j1elo 3y ago
    You made it sound like even for a simple site, JavaScript would be a necessity and we should expect websites to not work well without it. I was actually about to concede that it's OK if JS has eaten the world (see my closing thought)... Then read this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36849820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36849820 > you can still view it through https://nitter.net https://nitter.net, which I guess makes the open source Javascript-less front-end to Twitter more accessible for SEO WHAT? I had no idea. So there is Nitter [1] frontend for Twitter -which is a platform clearly more complicated than HN- and they manage to not only work without JavaScript, but have it as one of their core motivations. Things get even better, from that project I find about Invidious [2], a frontend for nothing else than YouTube! And again, no JS is not only an option but a highlighted feature. After these discoveries, my bar for how JS-free we should expect most websites to be has just gone up, not down. Especially those websites consisting on just presenting text and media (i.e. the immense majority) I agree the war is lost, though. Luckily there will still exist people desiring and making noise for a leaner and faster experience. The problem is bloated frameworks and privacy invasion via JS. Those are essentially my main reasons to want to browse the Web without JS. [1]: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter [2]: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

by xp84 3y ago

naikrovek 3y ago

why do you want a pony? they don't grow into full-size horses and they eat a lot and poop a lot.

john_the_writer 3y ago

Actually rails hides much of that now. Passing html over the wire is super easy, and I never give JS a second thought.

fullspectrumdev 3y ago

> decades of advancements in FE technologies to go back to script-free HTML. I don’t think modern webshit which requires downloading megabytes and megabytes of obfuscated code to view someone’s blog is an “advancement” for anyone except the adtech bastards.

j1elo 3y ago

Look. I agree with you, in the core idea. There have really been advances in technology, but for each step made with brilliance and prowess, there have been 3 steps back with laziness and carelessness. Some applications of the newer technologies merit their use. Most use cases, however, don't. Bad practices abound, the "art" of programming becomes a chore made by let's say not very skilled people. Luckily there are still lots of good managers and good devs that value adequately done products, but on average that's not the case and the Web gets more and more bloated as a whole. One day you decide to disable JavaScript in your phone (which BTW is an incredible way to speed up modern webshit, as the sibling comment puts it, in under-powered mobile devices), and turns out that lots of f*ing blogs don't load their plain text and static pictures if JS is not enabled. That's an absurd situation we've collectively ended up in. The mere thought of having a Word document with just text, images, and a couple tables, and not being able to open it if VB macros were disabled, sounds absurd. But that's exactly what large parts of the Web have become.

skinner927 3y ago
Your complain is conflated. Turning off javascript is not akin to turning off macros in a Word document. It’s like deleting your desktop environment and complaining Word doesn’t work in a terminal. I’m not sure if you’re really thinking about the impact of not having any javascript. Want to reply to a comment on HN? The whole page reloads. Want to upvote a comment? The whole page reloads. Sure you can give every comment an ID and reload back to where you were, but then you can’t have collapsible comments (because css, presumably what you’re hacking for collapsible comments without JS, can’t respond to anchor references). There’s a million other usability things that require JS, it’s so much more than a macro language. There are bad practices everywhere, in every field, and it feels like everyone feels they have the authority to beat down JS, and web dev as a whole, likely with zero experience working with it. Web arguably has the best developer experience of any field. It’s so good, they took the web and put it in your desktop. Electron, GTK, KDE, everything is javascript. The war is lost and over. Start arguing/discussing how JS can be improved instead that it shouldn’t exist (there’s PLENTY to complain about, don’t get me wrong).
- j1elo 3y ago
  You made it sound like even for a simple site, JavaScript would be a necessity and we should expect websites to not work well without it. I was actually about to concede that it's OK if JS has eaten the world (see my closing thought)... Then read this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36849820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36849820 > you can still view it through https://nitter.net https://nitter.net, which I guess makes the open source Javascript-less front-end to Twitter more accessible for SEO WHAT? I had no idea. So there is Nitter [1] frontend for Twitter -which is a platform clearly more complicated than HN- and they manage to not only work without JavaScript, but have it as one of their core motivations. Things get even better, from that project I find about Invidious [2], a frontend for nothing else than YouTube! And again, no JS is not only an option but a highlighted feature. After these discoveries, my bar for how JS-free we should expect most websites to be has just gone up, not down. Especially those websites consisting on just presenting text and media (i.e. the immense majority) I agree the war is lost, though. Luckily there will still exist people desiring and making noise for a leaner and faster experience. The problem is bloated frameworks and privacy invasion via JS. Those are essentially my main reasons to want to browse the Web without JS. [1]: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter https://github.com/zedeus/nitter [2]: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious https://github.com/iv-org/invidious