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by brogrammernot 3174 days ago
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.

2 comments

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.