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by bmelton 5734 days ago
You're overlooking a lot of powerful applications that need SOMEthing to work client-side. Markup.io, recently featured here, is not the sort of application that can post-through to another page to fix. One could argue that it might also work with Flash, or ActiveX, but I'm only even mentioning them to head off somebody else from doing so, as that's hardly a solution.

I suppose it could be implemented as an Applet, but what's important is that Markup.io is exactly the sort of thing that Javascript exists for, really. And yes, disabling JS will break it, completely, and yes, I think that's perfectly forgivable.

On the whole, I agree that my blog should degrade, and data-entry type applications should work as well, but saying that everything should is completely overlooking an entire category of application for which it's perfectly acceptable, in my opinion.

2 comments

Ok, good point. My problem is sites where it is reasonable to expect them to work without JS, but end up not working at all. I would never expect a specialized site like Markup.io or asteroids-on-a-page (forgot the name) to work without JS. News sites, portals, blogs, shopping sites, etc, are all fair game for no JS (like you said).

By the way, not sure if you're the author of Markup.io, but it's pretty cool.

Oh, no I'm not even remotely connected to it, it was just the first example that came to mind.

It is pretty cool though.

Markup.io isn't actually a part of the world-wide web of linked semantic documents. Its content is inaccessible (even for viewing) unless you blindly trust its code. It rightfully deserves to be a browser plugin, it's just cleverly smuggling itself into everyone else's content because there are no good portable extension mechanisms for browsers.
> because there are no good portable extension mechanisms for browsers.

...which is why JS is filling that gap. :)