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by mrandre 5437 days ago
Andre Behrens, creator of the app here.

My inbox has been flooded over the years with effusive messages about how much people like the way this works. The only people I've ever seen complain about usability are on hacker news.

Skimmer makes extensive use of standard javascript, css3, and HTML5 technologies. So I'm not sure what standards I've broken.

I think the meaning of the Gawker debacle might be open to interpretation without further data. For one thing, you should know that users with JS disabled make up a vanishingly small part of nytimes.com's readership.

And since Skimmer has enjoyed a largely enthusiastic response from readers, it stands to reason that most users are just fine with a js-heavy app. Most of our readers, anyway.

That said, if you hate this way of doing things, the entirety of nytimes.com is there for your classic web design enjoyment, and I certainly have no problem with your continuing to use it.

I would say maybe try the app for a while before you decide. Try the different layouts. Use the arrow keys. Try it on an iPad.

1 comments

The standard you've broken is to not have some kind of message for those that don't have javascript on. even having a "Please enable javascript to use Skimmer" would be a huge boon to everyone in that boat.
It's a very very small boat with only nerds in it.
I have been trying out Skimmer and do thing it is certainly a very interesting way to lay things out and get at the news. I have not decided my full opinion on it yet.

However, this unprofessional response from you does make me wary of it. A personal attack like this I feel was entirely uncalled for.

Second, I think this boat may be larger than you believe it to be. According to Mozilla[1], there's nearly 2 million potential browsers out there with some form of JavaScript filtering on by default. This is calculated from the number of browsers checking for updates, not from the download statistics (88 million at current writing). While other browsers[2][3] do not boast this large of a user base they are continuing to grow (3000 a week for chrome).

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=noscript&... [2]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/odjhifogjcknibkahl... [3]: https://addons.opera.com/addons/extensions/details/notscript...

That's uncalled for. And really is it that hard to give the small number of users that disable JavaScript some indication that your website would work if they enabled it?