I have JS on my page (<username>.org) but it's only for a fun, if slightly annoying visual effect that isn't triggered unless a link is clicked. I hope that's acceptable!
(To be clear, I'm not asking to join the club with JS on my page, just highlighting what I think is an acceptable use of JS)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I don't understand this obsession with not having JavaScript. Ideally all sites should work without JavaScript, but what's with this "I don't use that JavaScript non-sense" rhetoric?
Sure, and websites should respect that the browser doesn't want JavaScript. I've taken great care to make sure my site works with and without JavaScript. What I don't understand is why it's trendy to say you don't have JavaScript on your site.
This is the second time in as many days where "dark patterns" has been applied in an awkward way in a prominent place. Was there a widely discussed post where "dark patterns" was used in this way, and is the phrase going to become diluted now? It's a useful term, but it's not useful if people start using it the wrong way.
There will always be a tiny number of people who won't allow JS, will use Linux as their desktop, etc.
These people don't represent anyone's customer base and can be pretty much ignored on the basis that they are curmudgeonly tech contrarians. They can't be sold to anyway, so who cares.
> These people don't represent anyone's customer base and can be pretty much ignored on the basis that they are curmudgeonly tech contrarians. They can't be sold to anyway, so who cares.
Thankfully, the Web is not exclusively a commerce platform. Not all websites are beholden to investors.
So the less client side js the better, although I think things like ajax make a page more usable not less. So SSR pages with minimal amounts of js to facilitate no reload of the page for simple things... And CSS the rest of the way. Analytics can be server side too if need be. And graceful fallback if no js enabled.. so the only diff need be that instead of ajax u get full page reloads
If you mean something like a sidebar that pops out, that's definitely possible via some clever CSS. Make the menu button a hidden checkbox and add a CSS transition to move your sidebar based on its checked state.
While you can implement sidenavs using just CSS, you can't implement reveal menus which have become the most common nav for simple sites such as portfolios. Ie where you start with your fat logo centered and have it shrink into a fixed/sticky top menu/logo as you need to interrogate the scroll position for that.
For a lot of the entries here it's not only no js but minimal CSS and just minimal content as well.. showing me some sparse HTML with courier font is not really inspiring me here
While I'm in the camp that use Javascript is fun, useful, and cool, I also realize it's not nearly as necessary as some think it. The nojs.club site is a good idea, but now that it's been established I hope to see some actually good looking websites added.
There were about two when I clicked through the top 15 links- most of them are small black text on a bright white page. I'm grateful that at least the majority of those restricted page width to something less than 100 characters.
There's a perverse bias here that's almost in strange loop territory.
To submit a site, you have to file an issue on GitHub. If you consider developers who use GitHub vs developers who don't/won't use GitHub... it seems that any given developer in the former set is more likely to be using JS on their homepage than those in the latter set.
Regardless of anything, given the subtleties of the way the system is designed, it's important to understand that this is not, as will be popularly interpreted, a "list of people with homepages that don't use JS", but instead "a list of people on GitHub who have homepages that don't use JS".
(For anyone wondering why someone might not use GitHub, comments like the above are a good example. On GitHub, nobody recognizes the distinction between an error report and a support request.)
The only thing I'm wondering is why you felt it necessary to add this strangely patronizing comment. The GP voiced a simple complaint, not an "error report" or a "support request".
You are wrong about 'not an "error report"'. What you are calling a complaint was an error report. The person who responded ("If you want to add a site but don't use github, feel free to email me") did so in a way that would make sense if it were a support request. As a response to an error report, it's a non-sequitur. The inability to distinguish between support requests and error reports is precisely the reason for the "patronizing comment"—exactly as stated in the comment itself. So where's your confusion coming from?
Yeah, the 250kb club had a couple users submit initial criticism for the same reason; it responded by mirroring on sr.ht and setting up mailing lists, giving others the choice to use either.
I feel weird making my livelihood through js while also worrying about the implications of its misuse. I don’t personally write malicious code but I see so many ways to do it. If I didn’t have a well paying job I think it be easy to make the switch to be crappy
I don't find a single one of those websites aesthetically pleasing
And I’m finding that with all these “buck the site design trend with this unnecessary design constraint”
So far I haven't seen any staying power in production and it seems more like art subcultures that very young people dabble in for a while in niche online communities more so than a statement or something to pay attention to
Of course, that's entirely subjective and I think several sites on this list look great. Regardless, JavaScript does not inherently make a site look better, and it isn't a necessity for nice looking sites. See: CSS Zen Garden.
> Not all websites need Javascript to be beautiful and usable. This is a showcase of the Javascript-less web.
First link is literally only four lines of text. Three of those are links. Second link is dead. Third is basically the first but with emojis ... Ok, I stopped after that.
Yeah the majority of the websites seem like throw away projects that were made in 5 minutes. Whoever created this probably should have taken the time to find JavaScript free websites that are actually presentable.
You can't do any kind of ecommerce or media without Javascript (or something like flash). Do we really want to limit those sorts of things solely to apps? This whole movement is insane. Lets get rid of cars while we are at it, they run people over after all.
HTML also has elements such as <video>, <object> and <embed>, some of which have existed for many years already. As far as I'm aware, browsers are free to play any media files included via these tags directly, without relying on any external piece of software.
I was personally amazed by Amazon. Sadly it seems the websites that work best without JavaScript are those where I really don't feel like it's a hindrance to begin with.
Amazon is set up to make money when you spend money, not just by tracking you, so of course they would make their platform work without Javascript because you want to maximize the number of browsers people can use to impulse/drunk/Ambien order tons of useless shit from your site.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadSomeone might find it useful, and hopefully someone from GH takes the constructive criticism.
(To be clear, I'm not asking to join the club with JS on my page, just highlighting what I think is an acceptable use of JS)
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.
Secondly, JS abuse is now built into browsers, so yes no JS is a decent goal for privacy, security, and speed.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whether something is possible is not a reasonable standard to judge by.
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.
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.
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.
People started using invasive trackers not because the trackers are innate, but because someone built them.
People are starting to realise how a lot of JS use is unnecessary, and the opposition to it is growing.
These people don't represent anyone's customer base and can be pretty much ignored on the basis that they are curmudgeonly tech contrarians. They can't be sold to anyway, so who cares.
Thankfully, the Web is not exclusively a commerce platform. Not all websites are beholden to investors.
If so, I dducked "css only slide out menu" and this was the second result: https://1stwebdesigner.com/pure-css-navigation-menus/
Eg. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31506684/expand-collapse...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25240299
There were about two when I clicked through the top 15 links- most of them are small black text on a bright white page. I'm grateful that at least the majority of those restricted page width to something less than 100 characters.
To submit a site, you have to file an issue on GitHub. If you consider developers who use GitHub vs developers who don't/won't use GitHub... it seems that any given developer in the former set is more likely to be using JS on their homepage than those in the latter set.
Regardless of anything, given the subtleties of the way the system is designed, it's important to understand that this is not, as will be popularly interpreted, a "list of people with homepages that don't use JS", but instead "a list of people on GitHub who have homepages that don't use JS".
And I’m finding that with all these “buck the site design trend with this unnecessary design constraint”
So far I haven't seen any staying power in production and it seems more like art subcultures that very young people dabble in for a while in niche online communities more so than a statement or something to pay attention to
> Not all websites need Javascript to be beautiful and usable. This is a showcase of the Javascript-less web.
It does not say:
> JavaScript is bad and no one should ever use it.
First link is literally only four lines of text. Three of those are links. Second link is dead. Third is basically the first but with emojis ... Ok, I stopped after that.
What exactly is this trying to showcase again?
https://github.com/umaar/offline-website-scripts/tree/master...
- Lots of Google products don't work
- Wikipedia looks the same
- GitHub works pretty well, including lots of functionality I thought was JS only
- Amazon seems to work just fine
Allow me to introduce you to fire, and the wheel. ARM has a JS specific instruction.
If you want to homestead off the grid without JS I think that’s cool bro, but don’t act like you’re better for it.
I think something like CSS Garden is a much better showcase.
Shows a banner "You Don't Need JavaScript to Run This Site (turn it off here)"
It's a response to all the "You Need JavaScript to Run This Site" banners we see everywhere even on plain text/image sites.