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0 pointsdave200010y ago0 comments

> I feel like JS is an expected part of the web

You feel wrong. I enable it when I have to, only.

> How can you build engaging web applications

Not my problem. I want quick loading sites with as few malware vectors as possible.

You should be building web applications which facilitate the transfer of information. You don't need javascript and all the other crap people are using these days for that. I mean, if you're all about pure eye candy and doing..I dunno, mandelbrots or something in the browser, then yeah, you're going to need javascript. But it's not going to work on mobile. Hardly anything like that works on mobile, which is fine by me; I do most of my browsing there.

To be honest, I think there's a market for a firefox addon which removes links to sites which don't work on mobile/require you to have javascript enabled to save me the effort of clicking back when i arrive at am empty page or when the screen is dimmed and all I can see is the corner of some dialog I have no interest in zooming out to look at.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

Klathmon10y ago· 2 in thread

A few months ago I wrote a web-app that lets you pick an image off your computer, and convert it to a cross-stitch pattern.

I did it using javascript entirely client side, so it works offline, it's secure (as it doesn't send the images anywhere), and it is fast to load (letting you change settings and get the new cross-stitch in the blink of an eye).

With your idea of doing things, i would need to pay for a server (and would probably need to then charge my users who wouldn't pay, so it's now DOA), it would be significantly slower, it would be less secure/private, and wouldn't be able to do things like auto-change the size of the resulting image depending on the screen size of the browser (important for mobile! don't want to overload the browser with massive images).

That needs javascript, and for you and others to keep acting like anything that uses javascript is a toy that shouldn't exist is arrogant and wrong.

mixedCase10y ago

You should be shipping that as a browser extension. As it stands it's not good as a website, but it meets every criteria for a good extension.

It's even the kind of thing that passes for a native application in Chrome OS.

Klathmon10y ago

But if i shipped it as a "browser extension" i would need to make multiple versions for each browser, and it wouldn't work on most mobile devices...

And even as an app it's not that good. It's very single-purpose, there aren't really any "settings" that need to be saved, an app for this would be overkill.

As a website, it's quick to find on any device (desktop, laptop, phone, my damn TV!), it's extremely fast to install (if it takes more than a second to load on home internet i've done something wrong), has little to no footprint on the disk of the device, and does one thing and does it well.

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