[j1elo]

That might be a very misleading statistic. What if more than 0.2% of people wanted to disable JavaScript, but in the end surrended to the fact that those pesky web devs never test their creations with JS disabled?

I know I am one of those who would like to disable JS, but it's just not practical. So stats really are a dangerous tool, they sometimes can end up telling you just what you want to hear...

[lolinder]

If anyone tests their web pages without JS, it would be gov.uk. I'm an American but I frequently reference their guidelines on accessibility and similar because they're so thorough and conscientious about it.

[j1elo]

Yeah but I am afraid every other website on the Internet is not done with the care and good craftsmanship that the gov.uk applies to its website. I wish, though! But then so many web devs (and so many of their managers, too!) would be lost without knowing what to do without a JS framework that weights several MBs worth of bloat...

[john_the_writer]

It's about cost. If it takes a web dev a day to progressively enhance a page from html through css and JS, then it's a day they're adding value to a small slice of the users.

Even if you multiplied the 0.2 by 10 or 20, you're still looking at a slice not large enough to build for.

[j1elo]

I'd say it's about priorities (i.e. very much related to cost, but with slight differences). That's why I mentioned the lack of people who cares. If you as a manager care, or if a dev with enough decision power cares, it will just be included as part of the time it costs to get the website done.

A worker putting a helmet and appropriate clothes is losing time that could be beter spent producing value. Or if we talk about social policies and minorities, for example, even if as the word says, it's a "minority" of people so it might seem that it's a slice not large enough to improve for. A bit extreme examples, but you get the idea.

Also a 0.2% of all world population is still a huge amount of people. It's just that people who can take decisions, just don't care. But some people do care, like those in charge of co.uk websites, and then we all see how well things can be done and how poorly we've been doing in comparison.

[xp84]

> people...who would like to disable JS, but it's just not practical

As I tell my kid when he "wants" something, I want a pony, and a million dollars.

I don't see why the fact that some people might like that matters. I mean, given the choice for free sure I'd "like" it too. But it will never remotely be worth it to build two entirely separate web applications for every website to make that dream a reality, nor do I see the whole Internet agreeing to discard the decades of advancements in FE technologies to go back to script-free HTML.

All that said, boy would that be a great jobs program for developers over age 35 though! Imagine developing for the web with no Webpack, no JS compilers, transpilers, bundles.[1]

[1]: Or whatever you frontend folks use for your toolchain this year, or this nanosecond...

[fullspectrumdev]

> decades of advancements in FE technologies to go back to script-free HTML.

I don’t think modern webshit which requires downloading megabytes and megabytes of obfuscated code to view someone’s blog is an “advancement” for anyone except the adtech bastards.

[j1elo]

Look. I agree with you, in the core idea. There have really been advances in technology, but for each step made with brilliance and prowess, there have been 3 steps back with laziness and carelessness.

Some applications of the newer technologies merit their use.

Most use cases, however, don't.

Bad practices abound, the "art" of programming becomes a chore made by let's say not very skilled people. Luckily there are still lots of good managers and good devs that value adequately done products, but on average that's not the case and the Web gets more and more bloated as a whole.

One day you decide to disable JavaScript in your phone (which BTW is an incredible way to speed up modern webshit, as the sibling comment puts it, in under-powered mobile devices), and turns out that lots of f*ing blogs don't load their plain text and static pictures if JS is not enabled. That's an absurd situation we've collectively ended up in.

The mere thought of having a Word document with just text, images, and a couple tables, and not being able to open it if VB macros were disabled, sounds absurd. But that's exactly what large parts of the Web have become.

[skinner927]

Your complain is conflated. Turning off javascript is not akin to turning off macros in a Word document. It’s like deleting your desktop environment and complaining Word doesn’t work in a terminal.

I’m not sure if you’re really thinking about the impact of not having any javascript. Want to reply to a comment on HN? The whole page reloads. Want to upvote a comment? The whole page reloads. Sure you can give every comment an ID and reload back to where you were, but then you can’t have collapsible comments (because css, presumably what you’re hacking for collapsible comments without JS, can’t respond to anchor references).

There’s a million other usability things that require JS, it’s so much more than a macro language.

There are bad practices everywhere, in every field, and it feels like everyone feels they have the authority to beat down JS, and web dev as a whole, likely with zero experience working with it.

Web arguably has the best developer experience of any field. It’s so good, they took the web and put it in your desktop. Electron, GTK, KDE, everything is javascript.

The war is lost and over. Start arguing/discussing how JS can be improved instead that it shouldn’t exist (there’s PLENTY to complain about, don’t get me wrong).

[j1elo]

You made it sound like even for a simple site, JavaScript would be a necessity and we should expect websites to not work well without it. I was actually about to concede that it's OK if JS has eaten the world (see my closing thought)...

Then read this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36849820

> you can still view it through https://nitter.net, which I guess makes the open source Javascript-less front-end to Twitter more accessible for SEO

WHAT? I had no idea. So there is Nitter [1] frontend for Twitter -which is a platform clearly more complicated than HN- and they manage to not only work without JavaScript, but have it as one of their core motivations.

Things get even better, from that project I find about Invidious [2], a frontend for nothing else than YouTube! And again, no JS is not only an option but a highlighted feature.

After these discoveries, my bar for how JS-free we should expect most websites to be has just gone up, not down. Especially those websites consisting on just presenting text and media (i.e. the immense majority)

I agree the war is lost, though. Luckily there will still exist people desiring and making noise for a leaner and faster experience. The problem is bloated frameworks and privacy invasion via JS. Those are essentially my main reasons to want to browse the Web without JS.

[1]: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

[2]: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

[rjh29]

Maybe I'm just too old but it feels like humanity will always find a way to collectively fuck everything up. The web is always going to be shit. Fortunately another contingent of humanity invented uBlock and reading mode.

[john_the_writer]

Actually rails hides much of that now. Passing html over the wire is super easy, and I never give JS a second thought.

[naikrovek]

why do you want a pony? they don't grow into full-size horses and they eat a lot and poop a lot.