[jhhh]

I miss the text only reading era. This is a blog and should not need to have JavaScript enabled to render text to a page. I would rather not have to be annoyed by flavor of the month duplicate scroll bars, cookie banners, newsletter pop-ups 5 seconds in, scroll to the top pop-ups, idle overlays, highlight helper bars that break copy paste, etc. This blog didn't have all of those but had some. I'm sure the metrics look great because I had to load this page four times. First initially, and then disabling JavaScript and realizing it doesn't load anything at all. A third time re-enabling JavaScript and then deleting all the annoying elements, and then a fourth time to make sure my cosmetic filter is applied correctly. 4x the interactions! Must be doing something right.

[kohllision]

I appreciate the sentiment, but this remark is far too common here. It does not address the content of the post and could apply to any submission from LessWrong. The author of the post has made none of those technical choices.

[beepbooptheory]

You are not alone! There is in fact a whole dedicated rule about this on hn:

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Clearly doesn't really move the needle much but sometimes it helps to tap the sign at people.

Charitably, we are all on our own timelines of getting to HTML zen, and its hard not to shout from the rooftops when it clicks for you and you have your plain text RSS setup on Gnus all chugging along nicely.

[narcindin]

Funny, I assumed it was a subtle critique of how change always elicits haters. Though now I realize it was an honest non-sequiter to complain about his pet issue?

Honestly not sure anymore.

[gwern]

You'll love GreaterWrong, then: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/BJ4pnropWdnzzgeJc/i-am-de...

[kogasa240p]

Thanks, I keep JS disabled on most sites and am continually baffled on why simple text and image blogs are web apps now.

[hayleox]

Agreed. When I redid my portfolio site recently, I specifically sought out a static site generator that wouldn't require JS, and picked a basic no-frills prebuilt theme. But I found out the theme didn't handle disabled JS gracefully.

The fussiest part of the whole site setup was getting light/dark mode to work in what I thought was the most obvious way. To me, if a website has light and dark modes, it should default the user's device's preferred color scheme, and as an added bonus for users with JS enabled, you might also have a toggle button. But by default, the theme just started in light mode no matter what until you clicked the toggle button, and they also didn't bother to make the button hidden if JS is disabled.

Same with the button for the built-in search feature; it would be visible even if it couldn't work. It's not that it was terribly hard to modify the theme and fix this – add `class="nojs"` to the body HTML, add a JS one-liner to remove nojs, and add a CSS rule to hide the buttons if they're inside `body.nojs`. It was just disheartening to see that this was the theme's default. Anyone making a website these days has to make extra effort to support what should be considered normal browser behavior.

[nyfresh]

I long for the days of hand written scrolls. Fresh papyrus adorned with the latest calligraphy and stamped with a warm wax seal…

[lelandfe]

> I had to load this page four times. First initially, and then disabling JavaScript

Had to?

[burnished]

They gave enough detail that its clear from context what 'had to' meant.