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0 pointsseba_dos18y ago0 comments

No. It's just a problem of laziness, and possibly ego, of developers.

There are apps using browser as execution environment and there are websites. You wouldn't expect a client-side drawing tool, WebVR game or real time visualization of blockchain transactions to work without JS enabled.

However, you can easily expect a social network, mail client, news page, task app, and to some extent even things like IM to work with no JavaScript. "That's core" is just an excuse for poor architecture - it's only core because you chose to make it so.

There are apps and there are websites, with only some small part of grey area in between. If you're a web developer wanting to use newest, greatest trendy tools, you see everything as apps, despite of common sense suggesting otherwise, and you end up with no progressive enhancement for no good reason. When you take it to extremes, you end up creating such abominations like the old SPA Twitter frontend, spinning the fans of your laptop for 15 seconds just to display 140 characters of text, because "the core" is implemented as AJAX calls and fully rendered client-side.

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Someone12348y ago

> No. It's just a problem of laziness, and possibly ego, of developers.

We're talking about large organizations. No single developer is making these decisions. And the question is about resource allocation, if the choice is between improving the core experience or implementing an experience that <1% of our users will ever see, the choice is easy.

> "That's core" is just an excuse for poor architecture - it's only core because you chose to make it so.

It is core because the internet has democratically made it so. You're speaking for a very vocal minority. We're choosing not to implement a special mode for people who self-selected to receive a broken web experience. Fortunately that same demographic knows how to resolve the issue they caused.

> no progressive enhancement for no good reason.

A richer user experience is a very good reason. If the choice is between making the site richer and more immersive for 99% of users, and leaving 1% of users who wish to be contrarian for no reason out in the cold? So be it. A worthy sacrifice, in particular as this 1% selected themselves for punishment.

You're welcome to pick and choose any arbitrary part of the web to disable, maybe JavaScript, maybe CSS, maybe font rendering entirely, maybe disable images, but it gets a little silly when you blame others for your self imposed breakages. You don't want it broken? Don't break it.

seba_dos1OP8y ago

> If the choice is between making the site richer and more immersive for 99% of users, and leaving 1% of users who wish to be contrarian for no reason out in the cold?

There is no choice. You can either make it properly, in accordance to best engineering techniques, that make it work good enough with those restrictions and still work as rich as you want when you don't impose them. Or you can make it broken by doing it the lazy way.

Also, there are plenty of reasons to disable JavaScript. It often makes the web browsing experience better, faster and more energy efficient. Sometimes you care about those things way more than any perceived "richness". In many cases, lazy webdevs and their broken code are the only reasons why it might be worse.

robin_reala8y ago

I’d dearly love to have stats that aren’t a few years old, but when GOV.UK last ran an experiment it was 1.1% of people who arrived without JS (~1m page views a month) split into 0.3% who’d deliberately disabled JS and 0.8% who had a broken JS environment for another reason. Like I said, it’s a reliability issue, not pandering to people who choose to go out the way to ‘break’ their environment. So yes, by choosing a JS-only environment you’re prioritising developer needs over user needs. That’s potentially fine if the cost balance equation works out that way for you, but it’s a specific choice you’ve made to not support people who through no fault of their own don’t meet the requirements of the environment you’ve decided to create.

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