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by PhantomGremlin
1599 days ago
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So many sites. For example much of MSN is totally non-functional w/o Javascript. E.g. this brings up a totally blank page: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/they-had-covid-19-once-the... And of course Google really really wants JS to make it easier for them to spy on you. Youtube isn't useful w/o JS (but IIRC it used to at least somewhat function): https://www.youtube.com/ Fortunately search still works. Twitter are twats and broke all functionality w/o JS, but nitter.net is a workaround! Just replace twitter.com with nitter.net to see the tweet. Fortunately many sites that start out blank are quite functional w/o JS, just need to View -> Page Style -> No Styles. E.g. this one: https://www.politico.com/ ugly but readable. |
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Hmmm, I got the full text of the article, immediately readable with links(1), no problem using netcat or, e.g., curl.
NB. Unless required, I never send a user-agent header. Here, as is the case with 99% of the sites I visit, it was not required.
To watch the video, I used ffmpeg to save to an MP4 file:
However when I checked archive.org I noticed their archived page was different. It appeared to require Javascript.YouTube
I use YouTube without any JS.^1 I search from the command line using a tiny shell script. I download from the command line using a tiny shell script. With few exceptions I do not use youtube-dl.^1
1. Only exceptions are videos with a dynamic sig value in their googlevideo.com URL. Most videos I watch have static sig values in their googlevideo.com URL. Alternatively, I can use a "modern browser" to get the googlevideo.com URLs to download these videos, with all the tracking and other non-essential URLs blocked (no ads), instead of youtube-dl.
Twitter
I read Twitter without any JS. It currently works fine for me using links(1). I have a tiny shell script to download an entire feed if I need to find some historical tweet. Twitter does make changes from time to time. Previously I had to use the GraphQL API. Not anymore.
I agree 100% that the web of gratuitous JS sucks, but even with TCP clients and a text-only browser that do not run Javascript, I encounter few problems reading the textual information and/or downloading the binary files (resources) that websites provide.