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by afandian 3173 days ago
Good advice. Interesting that Canonical URLs aren't mentioned.

But the sheer arrogance of serving a webpage that doesn't render any text unless you execute their JavaScript really annoys me. It's not a fancy interactive web-app, it's a webpage with some text on it.

3 comments

I understand the frustration but you also understand that the vast majority of individuals render JS on the page and do not use text only browsers.

It’s not worth the time to appeal to such a minority share of internet users.

Your argument holds for web apps where it might be extra work to do progressive enhancement. But this is literally a webpage of text. It is more work to get JS involved.

Humans using off the shelf browsers aren't the only ones who consume webpages.

> But this is literally a webpage of text. It is more work to get JS involved. Humans using off the shelf browsers aren't the only ones who consume webpages.

Sort of, the contents of the post are in a database somewhere. It's not like someone uploaded a .html page to Blogspot and they converted it into JS. The JS makes it easier for users to customize templates.

The main reason you'd want to avoid doing something like this is that the Googlebot would penalize you, but somehow I doubt Google is concerned with that.

That said, it has a <noscript> version that seems to work fine (I turned off JS and it renders as expected.

> Sort of, the contents of the post are in a database somewhere. It's not like someone uploaded a .html page to Blogspot and they converted it into JS. The JS makes it easier for users to customize templates.

That's not always the case, either, however. There are a great many (majority?) of database-driven websites out there with framework-rendered templates; Django, Flask, Ruby on Rails, etc. They are not constructed using -- nor are they dependent upon -- JavaScript.

That's a bit disingenuous though because that's not because of user choice. JS has the enviable position of being the only language blessed to have an interpreter in the browser and this decision and it's consequences are foisted upon you regardless of whether you wanted it or not.

That argument also doesn't address OP's complaint: regardless of whether everyone has JS and uses it, the page is only rendering text, why is JS even necessary? It's not a web app, it doesn't have any special functionality etc, it doesn't have any legitimate reason to use JS, but for whatever reason, we're forced to use it anyway.

Loaded just fine with NoScript here.
I didn't get any text until I enabled JS (using uMatrix).
Yeah I have the same issue as it forbids the loading of urls but does not disable the javascript so that it uses <noscript>
Works fine when disabling javascript in Chrome developer tools too
The notion of surfing the web without JavaScript enabled is increasingly antiquated. You can't even log into Google without JS enabled; it's necessary to mandate it because of iframe attacks.
Not all web pages are (or at least need to be) web apps. Logging into an account vs reading a static page is apples to oranges.

Mandating JS to get any content, no matter how static, seems like the start of the death of e.g. Linked Data and a the web as an open standards based platform. I know I'm in the minority but diversity is a strength, and there are few places more important than the web.

I don't see why JavaScript is antithetical to linked data. If it's because the web page can't be statically analyzed, that's a solvable problem---you dynamically execute the page in a JavaScript sandbox.

Google had to solve a similar problem to successfully index Flash content. [https://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexin...]

To whom is it increasingly antiquated? Are you calling me old or what? I use uMatrix always, and allow pages i want to load JavaScript, and I try to get more and more people to do this actually when they say they have issues with bilion popups and adds. Using addblockers should be increasingly a positive trend not antiquated unless you want to part of botnet.
pop-ups and ads? I use uBlock and I don't disable JavaScript. I don't have any issue any more.