Ask HN: Can we just agree on showing HTML without requiring JavaScript?
I'm browsing with JS and cookies disabled for speed and safety. Lately, more and more simple and plain blogs require JS to show any text on website. 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?
For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30725933
Go ahead, disable JS and try opening blog on this link. Won't happen...
This page is simple dark text on white background with some images sprinkled in. Why is JS required to show this?
I'm sure I'm not alone in this...
64 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 28.7 ms ] threadEven 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!
Same, I would prefer to use https://nitter.net front-end, rather than https://twitter.com
eg. https://nitter.net/pastebin/status/1250847990131986432 vs https://twitter.com/pastebin/status/1250847990131986432
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.
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.
A little JS for the right reason can be very valuable, but requiring JS just to get a minimally usable page is insane.
Why would anyone invest significant engineering time to placate a userbase that's far far smaller than Internet Explorer 10 usage?
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.
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.
> Lately, more and more simple and plain blogs require JS to show any text on website.
HackerNews can definitely be partially cached, i.e. the front page. But HackerNews is on the other perfectly usable without JS - just because your content is dynamic does not mean it requires JS.
You can even mostly use facebook without JS too: https://mbasic.facebook.com
Nobody expects the full experience, but it should be usable. It doesn't require some insane engineering effort - in fact, the opposite - under-engineer the website!
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.
I've long considered websites that fail to do this to be poorly engineered.
It also walls an increasing amount of the web off from those of us who reject JS because of the security risks it brings.
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?
Such move is harmful for the society and must end before it's too late. We must came back to classic desktop computing and punishing all evolution that try to lock users. Modern web(cr)apps fall in this very category.
It's very asinine for instance forcing people's on crappy bloated banking portals instead of agree around a common and standard API (like SEPA OpenBank) leaving users using their favorite local app where all transactions are locally stored, digitally signed by the bank so source of truth in user hand, always available, with as many banks as users want under a common user-chosen UI. No need for crappy monsters WebVM, no need for gazillion of resources just to keep pushing around garbage mostly used for surveillance. The same apply to taxes and pretty anything else.
Personally I like reading post with Firefox reader just to avoid being distracted by the crap added to most websites, if a website does not render in Reader or without js I simply avoid it.
Looking at it from a business perspective, it's also a matter of cost. How big a percentage of people have JS off (I searched a bit and everything suggests low single digits, 1-2%), versus how much time do I spend making sure the site is somewhat functional to serve these people. And does somewhat functional make sense? Can they see my site but they can't go into my sales funnel without me making HTML-equivalent pages? In that case why would I bother unless that percentage of users grows to where it becomes financially interesting to me?
Still, would be nice if most sites would at least render some plain HTML fallback with a bit of info, instead of a single line on a white page saying "this doesn't work".
I don't understand what you mean here.
> Looking at it from a business perspective
Which, I suppose, is the underlying problem. In my opinion, the drive to turn websites into revenue generators has had a corrosive effect on the entire web. I suppose that I just have to accept that increasing portions of the web are going to be hostile and to be avoided. It just saddens me, as so much -- perhaps a majority -- of the web is already more of a security risk than I can bear.
> Still, would be nice if most sites would at least render some plain HTML fallback with a bit of info, instead of a single line on a white page saying "this doesn't work".
More info is better than less info, but either way, the page still won't work.
While I agree, there is the other side of that. They are very very expensive. Even a simple site needs servers, and devs.
> More info is better.
For who? If I tell the 2% of people out there that I sell these awesome things and they attempt to purchase them, but they can't because they have JS off, who did that knowledge help?
Now if it cost me 10k to tell the 2% they're waisting their time here, I'm out 10k and they're no better off than when they got a blank page.
To me, the browser is an application platform. That it originated as a document viewer is historical trivia.
But please, please do render html _without_ requiring JS to do so... That's my main issue - getting blank white page on a simple text based html page like the one mentioned before...
I think it might be the cause of the problem some of us have with today's bloated Web. Sure, it wasn't ideal and definitely it wasn't pretty, but it was way more usable than today.
>If you want the web to be cookieless and JS-less
Where did the author explicitly asked for the web to be cookieless and JS-less?
All he asked was for the page to be showing HTML. And furthering inferring, may be pages could use less JS when they not needed?
Well, we can. Some people here have even suggested just _how_ we can, so it's not that we can't. We're just not. You know, for reasons.
> We can't agree on your stance, because other people have different stances.
We can't agree on your stance on racism because other people have different stances.
To put my point less facetiously; opinions aren't the end of a discussion, they're the beginning. Presumably these stances you speak of are based on something. Well okay, this guys stance is based on something too. Discuss the merits of each and you can arrive at one stance that's more correct than the other. Unless of course one of you stops at some point in the discussion and says "Yeah, well, that's just like, your opinion, man".
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
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).
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.
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.
- Video
- Plain-Text
- Images
- Sometimes forms
HTML provides everything you could need in the huge majority of cases.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Preach it, brotha!
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.
- 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?