There's no reason why this page couldn't work without JavaScript. It's a poll and a display of the results.
Sure, enhance it with JavaScript: that's great, and it's cool, and it's useful. But don't force people to execute code when all they really need to do is POST a form and then GET a page.
> There's no reason why this page couldn't work without JavaScript.
Your position is ridiculous. HTML5 was designed in part to make it easier to create applications that run in your browser. So yes some people will be writing applications that run in your browser. It's like expecting flash sites to work when you don't have flash turned on. Either be happy with your choice or turn it back on. Don't expect the rest of the world to cater to your fringe browser settings.
Everything is an app. There are apps that show a GIF and all they do is that on many app-stores, with lot's of downloads because the GIF happens to be that of a woman's bum.
But what incentives will exactly cause developers to continue to develop web pages wherever possible instead of bundling everything into apps? Website owners also like the power that they can get from executing full-blown programs on each client's machine, rather than serving dumb unidirectional data. The Internet has evolved in many ways just like the outside world has evolved, IMO. The "correct" or the "elegant" is rarely what actually seems to happen. Instead it's a wild struggle for survival in which boundaries are pushed and abused, which leads to wonderful innovations, but the downside is there's nothing "ethical" about it.
The problem is that hosts have too much control over client's experience. Frankly, most of the works designers today do on the web is work that should not be done - 90% of websites would be infinitely better if they only sent text with lightweight semantic annotations and a list of available actions. The user should be able to explore the data in whatever way they please, and not be shoehorned into a single prescribed way of interaction.
That said, your point on incentives is spot-on. People making money on the web benefit from any marginal increase of control they can get - so the whole thing turns into a typical race to the bottom. And then, they also can (and do) use their money to influence the development of web technologies to make it easier for them to make more money. This process sadly isn't any different than regulations being influenced by businesses to benefit them instead of society.
Is there a solution? I don't know. Most people don't even realize how much of their own time and potential they waste by accepting the "status quo". I hope someone eventually develops a browser with sole purpose of unfucking the Internet. Some kind of a cross between links, Emacs and the Reader Mode from Firefox.
I can understand requiring JavaScript if it's a game or some sort of multimedia experience, but something like this really doesn't need JavaScript.
Search engines typically don't run JavaScript, so relying on it can be bad for SEO, and in some cases accessibility.
Considering iOS devices don't support Flash, and popularity for Flash is waning, I think it's even worse to suggest a website should cater only to those who can run Flash.
> Your position is ridiculous... It's like expecting flash sites to work when you don't have flash turned on.
Not really. Nobody is expecting JS code to work without a JS interpreter being available/enabled. Instead, they're expecting a page of text + images to work without any JS code being required.
In your analogy, nobody expects Flash objects to work without Flash. Everybody expects text + images to work without Flash objects being required.
Yes, and it's been thoroughly abused by lazy/incompetent developers. That's why we end up with 3 MB pages running React or whatever shiny new web framework Facebook/Google has released to display three paragraphs of text.
I would really like to have a web of static files with hyperlinks. We could keep it separate from the web of AJAX and touch events and scroll-hijacking. They don't even feel like the same thing anyway.
Why would you want that instead of AJAX-y functionality? Page reloads increases wait times, and depending on use case, drastically increases page size.
>Page reloads increases wait times, and depending on use case, drastically increases page size.
Considering the sizes of the javascript libraries loaded by all of the websites, I find it unlikely that the page size for a static page will be larger.
The average size of a single page is larger than a doom install now. That's not because of orders of magnitude more of HTML. It's because of the 15 different tracking JS libs, analytics libs, effects libs, etc that are piled into every site.
Full page reloads were a big deal when most people were on dial-up connections.
With proper caching and today's connectivity it's far less of an issue.
AJAX-y still is nicer and definitely has its place but at least speaking for myself if I'm reading a blog or a news site I'd prefer a fast static page rather than a lot of gratuitious ajax animations and transitions.
The big difficulty these days is mobile. When I'm traveling, I can download a simple HTML page pretty quickly, but every request is a crapshoot. If I need more than a few small requests to use your site, I'm likely not getting it depending on where I am.
News articles should absolutely be almost JS-free. The current status of news sites is ridiculous. But this page is an interactive visualization, so it makes sense to use JS. The JS debate isn't an all-or-nothing argument. Documents should be documents. Apps should be apps. Interactions that are more complicated than simple documents require some JS.
But documents like these aren't commonplace[0]. JS isn't used to enhance documents, it's used to make them much worse - because that degrading of quality and experience is how websites make money.
Apps are obviously a different beast. Most of websites don't need to be or behave like apps though.
[0] - which is a very sad thing; it's exactly the kind of advantage computers have over paper, and it's not being used at all. You either get dumb text that's even less functional than a book (think of articles rendered to image), or wasteful apps with shit-ton of ads and tracking.
And what about the 99% of people who don't have a problem with the 99% of the web you feel is shit? Why should the web be limited to only what you feel is worth your time?
Do we know that 99% of people don't have a problem with 99% of the web? Or do they not know how to express their displeasure with it or whom to express it to? I hear complaints all the time from normal users about top sites. They don't sound happy to me at all, they just sound like they're frustrated and don't think anyone is listening.
Also, most people have no clue about how websites work, and so they can't really imagine how they could look like. Moreover, most people accept whatever market throws at them, because they don't have any other choice anyway.
That's what gopher is for. The WWW has javascript as a requirement, and I think it's time to stop holding onto any misconceptions otherwise.
Apparently this is an unpopular notion. There's an entire protocol that's based on links between plain content - use it! The non-javascript users on the WWW are such a tiny minority that nobody who pays developers is going to bother with the time. The average user wants the extra functionality that even basic JS can provide - demanding that the web be supported without it is akin to demanding support for IE4 on Mac Classic.
That is the reality, folks. You don't have to like it, but you should accept it.
The average web user is ignorant of the possibilities. If they knew how much faster and stable their web-using experience would be without the excessive, unnecessary JS on many sites, they would gladly vote for "no JS" as a default.
The content of most sites created today could reasonably been hosted on sites when IE4 for Mac Classic was current, text, pictures, form fields & buttons. You don't have to prove it but you should build such a site today using methods that would likely mean someone using IE4 for Mac Classic would have some access to the content, albeit not an optimal experience.
And uglier, and limited. While the people here might not have any problem with the entire web looking like Ward Cunningham's wiki, I doubt the public at large feels the same...
This is not an attractive website. This site is objectively fucking awful because of the cruft. (Most of the time pages don't load for me. See this as one example: http://imgur.com/4WgHhVh )
Ensuring that the lowest-end gets some experience doesn't mean modern devices and browsers must have an uglier or limited experience. Progressive enhancement, it's a thing.
The last time I checked, the "average user" can't even use the web without getting their computer infected with malware served by ad networks. They may want functionality, but as far as I'm concerned they aren't aware of the price they are paying for it.
Honestly, most people don't want shit. They accept what they're given. It's not like anyone is even honestly asking them what they want.
(And if they complain that things are worse than they were, they often misattribute them anyway. My mother blames a lot of things on her computer being too slow, even though half of them aren't really the fault of the computer, but of the lazy-ass companies putting increasingly bloated shit on-line.)
i hold gopher in high regard. For most personal projects, gopher would make everything so much easier. Add a bit of convenience stuff, like basic text and image flow without having to do any css . navigation solves itself with gopher. wham, the perfect personal web page.
What's the difference between having a web server look up an article in a DB and serve it to you, and having a web page's JS look up that article in a DB and pull it to your browser? It seems like that would be the least offensive use of JS.
You can absolutely use JavaScript to pull an article into the browser.
But if the user doesn't have JavaScript, they should still be able to navigate the site the old-fashioned way. It doesn't have to be one way or the other.
I think the vast majority of people browsing without JS are people who have manually disabled it. Which goes back to my first question: Can we make a JS that's acceptable to those people, so they will just enable it?
I regularly browse the web using Lynx, a text-only browser that doesn't even have a setting to enable JavaScript.
There should almost always be fallbacks for people who don't have JavaScript, but if you are going to use JavaScript, it would at least help if any nontrivial code were free, such that it isn't blocked by the LibreJS add-on.
At the very least, the user experience with JavaScript enabled should not be worse than with JavaScript disabled.
It's not the problem of JS, it's what is being done with it. It's about bullshit and bloat, about lazy-ass developers, designers showing off and the web being fashion-driven industry. It's about ads and tracking.
The only way to fix it JS-level is to bake a requirement into the standard that the code size limit for JS is 256kb. If a company can't fit their "value-added features" in it, that's their problem.
I don't know if there are stats about disabling JS in the preferences of the browser, but I'm using NoScript. That's a finer grained control. Absolutely no JS would mean almost no web nowadays. Maybe wikipedia works.
serious question: could you explain what you think is wrong with websites using javascript? Why do you refuse running javascript in your browser?
My understanding is that javascript is a part of the web today, and everything around it makes it easier to run javascript applications in your browser, making websites more powerful.
I personally love this and a lot of website I browse would be worse without javascript (google docs, calendar, etc.), so I have trouble understanding what is wrong with javascript running.
Also, since now most apps are complete javascript apps (and not only some DOM manipulation), it seems a lost cause to try to get website optionally "extend" their experience with javascript. That would mostly just imply to re-built most of the page for when javascript is disabled.
I have a completely different experience from you.
As I'm reading this on my phone, most of the website related experience is better without JavaScript.
I also had in the past legally blind co-workers that could barely use a browser, so they had their own problems with JavaScript overriding defaults.
By the look of it: if JavaScript proponents designed car doors, there would only be remote unlocking and no physical key.
It's just bad engineering lately beign promoted as 'the default way to build webpages'.
The problem is that once javascript is enabled on a page, there is too large of a business incentive to tack on google analytics, auto-playing video ads, facebook and linked-in and twitter integration, annoying subscribe popups, etc. Javascript is necessary in the web that I want for the future but I want some standards for what gets run in my browser without me going through manually and whitelisting specific scripts to block out the 10s of MB of crap that get thrown at me every time I go to a new site.
Because it gets abused by so many. It's used to track, to annoy (popups, autoplay and all that crap), it often breaks hyperlinks (you can't link to content that is loaded by JS code instead of by clicking a link), it blows my data cap on mobile, it heats my CPU, and it drains my battery.
If I start my browser with JS enabled, it takes a few days and Firefox is at 100% CPU continuously, making my laptop battery last 2 instead of 5 hours, and if you start a packet sniffer, you see how all kinds of tabs are constantly reporting back to their mothership what I am doing.
That is why I keep JS disabled.
Also, most things that can be improved in websites (not to be confused with web apps) with JS would be better implemented as browser functionality.
It's never too late to do the right thing. It may be expensive, and it may require swallowing one's pride, and it may not have the same benefits that doing it earlier would have, but it's never too late.
Google maps is a reasonable use of javascript. Using a dynamic interface like that vastly improved the user experience. Can't say the same about showing an textual article or a photo.
This one is on the web devs more than Mozilla. IMO there is not much that a browser vendor can do, when what a large percentage of developers and users care only about the fancy new features.
This website is not intended for people who know what Javascript is or even how to turn it off. Most of the web are not (us) geeks, and not everything revolves around us.
There's no reason why this page couldn't work without JavaScript. It's a poll and a display of the results.
Sure, enhance it with JavaScript: that's great, and it's cool, and it's useful. But don't force people to execute code when all they really need to do is POST a form and then GET a page.
People who do this are wrong.