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by layer8 852 days ago
There is no good reason that this kind of content would need any client-side logic. Not being able to view it with tools like w3m is an unnecessary limitation.

It’s also ironic that the one thing HTML was designed for, namely presenting static content, is now deemed unworkable without having to run custom client-side code.

3 comments

> There is no good reason that this kind of content would need any client-side logic.

One such reason might be that it allows the developer to host their frontend statically, which usually is much simpler to set up and operate.

I would find it fair to appreciate that the author provides their service for free to the world. So while it might be true that their website isn’t fully compatible with certain client-side tools, that kind of support doesn’t come for free, and it also may not align with the goals of the author. (Which in this case apparently are educational ones, and not to maximise accessibility for a broadest-possible audience.)

If the commenter had said, "I can't view this with w3m," I'd understand that more. What's frustrating is that most of these comments are from people using an extension like NoScript or who have disabled JavaScript in their browser settings, based on (misguided IMO) privacy or security fears.

There's nothing wrong with tampering with your browser by disabling JavaScript, but you have to understand that what you're doing is unsupported by websites. It's unreasonable to complain that the website is broken when you disabled the technologies that the web developer chose to use.

> It’s also ironic that the one thing HTML was designed for, namely presenting static content, is now deemed unworkable without having to run custom client-side code.

Because the content here is dynamic. It changes every 30 minutes, even if it's just the scores. HTML was not designed to serve dynamic content.

That’s not dynamic content. It’s okay to have some optional JavaScript to dynamically update the scores or whatever. But that’s no reason not to show the main/initial content without JavaScript. As a user I certainly prefer regular content to not update by itself, though.