Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by warfangle 4792 days ago
Most sites these days are inoperable without JS.
1 comments
TazeTSchnitzel 4792 days ago
Not really. Name me a major site that doesn't work at all without JS.
link
fabriceleal 4792 days ago
Dropbox - https://www.dropbox.com/

In Firefox 20.0.1, with Javascript disabled, after the login the home listing has a "The Dropbox website require JavaScript" text.

[EDIT: Clickable, more info]

link
TazeTSchnitzel 4792 days ago
Well, Dropbox is an interesting example. If you have no JS, you probably can't download much either.
link
fabriceleal 4792 days ago
Why not? As it seems, JS is not doing anything that isn't do-able with a <a href="...file..." target="_blank"> - as soon as the browser gets a file that it cant render (.zip, ...), it will download it.

The magic is in the server, which must set the MIME type to application\octet-stream or something similar, so the browser doesnt try to render certain browser-rendable files (.htmls, .pdfs, ...)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3749231/download-file-usi...

link
TazeTSchnitzel 4792 days ago
I just mean users without JS usually aren't ones who are downloading files. Lynx is possibly an exception, though, since it's sometimes used by server admins like myself to grab packages.
link
fabriceleal 4792 days ago
Ah ok. But is there some reason for Lynx not to support JS? Is this by design? I also found out about links [1] and elinks [2] but seems that their JS support is marginal or requires compiling with certain flags [3]. Haven't anyone tried to incorporate V8 yet?

[1]: http://links.twibright.com/

[2]: http://elinks.or.cz/index.html

[3]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9353519/lynx-with-javascr...

link