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by nulbyte 2630 days ago
I wholeheartedly disagree. This is a public-facing government website. It ought to degrade gracefully in order to reach the broadest possible audience. Or, write a decent site to start with, and you wouldn't have to worry about degrading. The entire page is nothing but a shell for a web app written in JavaScript that doesn't need to be a web app written entirely in JavaScript.
2 comments
Someone1234 2630 days ago
> It ought to degrade gracefully in order to reach the broadest possible audience.

You mean under 1% of users that intentionally broke their browser?

Seems unreasonable to dedicate resources to that, that could be better spent on 99% of our users. Why should the 1% get special treatment? And what other parts of their browser can they disable that we need to support, perhaps no CSS? Maybe IE5? Maybe they only render XHTML? Etc.

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eitland 2629 days ago
> You mean under 1% of users that intentionally broke their browser?

I'd say: configured their browser to work like a browser instead of like a platform to run arbitrary code from the Internet.

Ideally we should be able to trust most of the web sites we visit. The last few years have shown us this is a bad idea, here are my two top reasons:

- security: while I'm personally less concerned with reasonable ads there are a number of problems with ad technology, like infectious ads and creepy tracking.

- a bigger problem for now IMO: poorly written web apps that makes the machine noticably slower.

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webmaven 2629 days ago
There is still one important scenario that benefits from supporting a fallback to "classic" HTML for web sites (and apps): Bandwidth constrained environments. GMail's plain HTML version is an existing example (a link to it shows up if the JS version takes too long to load).

Anyway, for public facing sites and apps, you may already be doing most of the necessary work for SEO purposes. Letting humans access the version that you're showing to search engine spiders shouldn't be a huge burden.

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gbear605 2630 days ago
Ideally, yes. Realistically, it’s not worth the cost.
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msla 2629 days ago
> You mean under 1% of users that intentionally broke their browser?

No, for the people who can't afford to upgrade to the latest technology.

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yawaramin 2630 days ago
Answered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19609249
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