by nameequalsmain on 10/15/22, 6:54 AM with 149 comments
by cercatrova on 10/15/22, 5:52 PM
There are just too many interesting things JS can do. I've been playing around with Three.js and it's been incredible the types of 3D art you can create. I want to make those experiences for users which is simply impossible without JS.
However, I will also say that most of the websites I do make will work without JS because I use Next.js as a server rendering framework, plus CSS can handle a lot of things these days, such as modals, link trees, etc that used to require JS and I use those where possible.
What I will not do though is re-implement logic just for JS disablers. A particular example is using an animation library like Framer Motion that works with JS. It is somewhat possible to achieve similar effects in CSS, creating your own spring function in SCSS for example, to interpolate between values, but I'm not going to do that because it's effectively double the work for 1% of the users. Even the 1% figure is misleading for production apps if you use TypeScript (to prevent JS breakage) or modern dev practices like distributed CDNs (to prevent a package from getting loaded).
by recursivedoubts on 10/15/22, 2:53 PM
JavaScript became popular because HTML stopped moving forward as a hypermedia, focusing instead on client-side features that, while certainly nice, didn't increase the expressive power of the format in terms of hypermedia.
by TimPC on 10/15/22, 4:11 PM
by ravenstine on 10/15/22, 3:28 PM
If it's really that hard for you to prerender a page on the server, then just send the text by itself. Can you do that? I don't need you to prerender your header, your footer, your menus, or any of that junk. Give me the text body. Place it in an element your JavaScript code can replace when it boots, if I choose to let it run at all, which I won't if I can avoid it.
by sylware on 10/15/22, 7:34 PM
The only web engines today are blink/geeko, financed by google(vanguard/blackrock), and webkit financed by apple(vanguard/blackrock). They are all written using c++ which has also a grotesquely and absurdely massive and complex syntax, and better not have a look at the compilers... aka double the pain.
In other words: "javascript" = don't have "big tech" controlled software? no web for you!
hard truth: bazillions of online services can work perfectly without a "javacript"-able web engine (javascript alone is some work but several orders of magnitude less), namely basic (x)html forms can do wonders... and actually they were!! But web dev tantrums and planned obsolescence got involved.
The only way out of it is very strong regulation, and I am personally seeing lawyers to seek noscript/basic (x)html interoperability on "critical online services".
by superkuh on 10/15/22, 2:40 PM
by lagrange77 on 10/15/22, 2:42 PM
Offer the minimum core functionality without js. Add js for better UX and additional functionality.
by deworms on 10/15/22, 4:21 PM
The whole point of websites is lost if they can't track visitors, see what they're paying attention to, and how to manipulate their behavior. Everyone's doing it, and if you don't, you're at a disadvantage. There are very few websites whose purpose is not to influence you to spend money on something. Most of the articles and posts you read are AI generated, or written by "content writers" never intended to be read by actual people, they're there for the google bot to keep some activity going.
by throw_m239339 on 10/15/22, 4:37 PM
by jakear on 10/15/22, 2:59 PM
But if I made that site with JS, and some user wrote in telling me they disabled JS and it didn’t work, I’m much more likely to tell them to either enable JS or pound sand than I am to reimplement the logic on a platform where any requests beyond 125k/mo or 100hrs compute start billing me.
by fexelein on 10/15/22, 1:32 PM
by abemassry on 10/15/22, 3:26 PM
by mro_name on 10/15/22, 7:08 PM
an immediately readable text rather than a program that tries to generate one.
by Lucent on 10/15/22, 3:16 PM
by kgbcia on 10/15/22, 2:42 PM
Also, without JavaScript, some webapps would require storing user state in a server database rather than in memory of the browser.
Fix html and we won't need JavaScript.
by dusted on 10/15/22, 1:57 PM
by unreal37 on 10/15/22, 2:37 PM
If it's just your hobby site... great, develop it without JS.
But if it's a site people pay to access (or requires ads) and they expect some functionality - like Youtube or Netflix say - I don't think this is possible.
by encryptluks2 on 10/15/22, 2:31 PM
by chrismorgan on 10/15/22, 2:43 PM
The whatdoesmysitecost.com links are now broken and that site as a whole seems to be fairly broken, but it was discussed here last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27759583. They claim that the method they used to decide prices is a best-case scenario, but in reality it’s generally not far off a worst-case scenario, regularly off from the likely realistic case by at least a factor of ten. Though there certainly are scenarios where the cost will be even higher than the figure presented.
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> Very old browsers like IE < 3, Netscape 1, Mosaic, and others don't support javascript. Almost nobody uses these browsers anymore — but you can bet somebody is.
Your site should not work in those named browsers, because you should be serving by HTTPS only (no, your general-purpose public-internet site is not an exception). And using comparatively recent cipher suites so even things like IE 8 should not work. But the likes of Lynx, sure.
—⁂—
For my part, I default to turning JavaScript off via uMatrix because it makes the web better and faster and lighter far more often than it breaks things. But I also have that extension disabled in Private Browsing windows, so if I want to run something with JavaScript I can open it that way nice and easily.
by dehrmann on 10/15/22, 3:54 PM
by labrador on 10/15/22, 6:52 PM
by sweetheart on 10/15/22, 2:39 PM
by verisimilitudes on 10/15/22, 5:59 PM
by zaptheimpaler on 10/16/22, 7:20 AM