[theg2]

As a web developer, people like you always make me wonder why I try. Yes, some sites abuse javascript for terrible purposes, but as CSS becomes more powerful, are you going to start blocking that too?

Complaining that a site doesn't work because you purposely disabled part of the code is akin to complaining your car doesn't work because you pulled the alternator.

[epistasis]

I, for one, would greatly appreciate web developers trying far less hard.

Breaking scrolling, javascript on or off, is inexcusable. The UI is the most important thing, far more important than all the other slow-loading javascript chrome that decreases this article's usability and stickiness.

You know what else I can't do? Get smooth scrolling when I page up and page down. Further, I can't use the top 100 pixels because it's occupied by a worthless black bar.

There are fewer than 80 words on the screen in a "full" page of text at normal window sizes.

This entire design is amateurish, thoughtless, and user-hostile, all because some set of web developers are trying something and end up making the page much worse than if they had tried less.

[theg2]

You're generalizing an entire industry based on a few bad sites. All the interactive projects you see news organizations doing are REQUIRE Javascript. You're asking developers to handicap themselves just because a few people decided to abuse a tool.

I've never done any of those things you've mentioned above and my first aim is always user experience across all devices. Don't portray all developers who are creating good experiences on the web as bad guys. Show HN itself contains numerous examples of Javascript doing amazing things in the browser and your attitude craps all over the hard work of those people.

[emp_zealoth]

Maybe you should stop trying. It's infuriating to have a simple webpage strain a 3 years old laptop. And crash firefox on Android because it requires too much ram. Please, for heavens sake stop that madness! Disabling pinch-to-zoom and similar Web 2.0 nonsense. Just stop. I usually use readability to fight the nonsense.

About Buffet: He seems to be a counterexample to current economic dogmas

[Joeboy]

> As a web developer, people like you always make me wonder why I try.

To me, "trying" would involve not writing your pages in a way that means people can't read them. If for you trying involves deliberately doing the opposite of that, I also wonder why you try, and wish you would stop.

[theg2]

You do realize that Javascript powers the majority of ads, you know, the things content creators need to continue creating. And don't forget all those great Show HN browser libraries and projects powered by Javascript. News organizations and interactives to do data journalism? Yea, Javascript.

I'm fully against people creating a frustrating user experience by people using tools, but I don't blame the tools, I blame the people.

[TheLoneWolfling]

Your analogy fails.

Javascript is designed to be an addon to HTML / CSS. An alternator is not designed to be an addon to a car. (Well, to be pedantic an alternator is an addon, but some means of electrical generation isn't - some means of electrical generation is integral to a (non-diesel) motor)

A better analogy might be your car refusing to start because your OnStar subscription expired - and things like that are actually starting to happen. And no, I don't like it there either.

Here's the thing with JS: I fail to see what it adds. And yet at the same time I can see rather drastic examples of what it loses. Namely security.

I will start enabling JS by default when JS-based exploits stop being a routine thing. However, I doubt that will happen anytime soon. Because, oddly enough, when you have a complex language, and everyone demands every last drop of performance, security suffers. At least assuming dev time is constant. Oh, and enabling JS also enables an absurd amount of tracking. And performance problems. Oh, and website bloat. So those are the downsides.

As such, what are the upsides? Give me a justification for why I should enable JS globally. I have yet to see a good reason. And no, badly reimplementing parts of HTML / CSS is not an answer. AJAX? There are some things that are better with AJAX, for certain definitions of better. In which case I enable it for the page / website and go from there. Still not a justification for globally enabling JS. And most of the time I'd prefer proper pages anyways. AJAX tends to break things - URLs actually being uniform resource locators and opening links in new tabs in particular. About the only thing I actually find myself wanting AJAX for is webmail clients, and it's iffy even then. Most other things are, again, bad reimplementations of HTML / CSS. (Case in point: infinite scrolling)

And as for your comment about CSS - yes, in fact. Or rather, there are a number of websites that I override the CSS on. And if/when there starts to be a steady stream of exploits for features in CSS, I'll consider blocking those by default. But currently there doesn't seem to be. Largely, I suspect, because CSS parsing isn't Turing-complete (as far as I know at least). (I know that CSS + repeated "dumb" input is Turing-complete, but that's not the same thing.)

In parting: I don't mind when disabling JS disables JS-only features. What I mind is when disabling JS means that the things that HTML / CSS are designed for no longer work because devs tried too hard to reinvent the wheel. Case in point: those websites that require JS just to display a static page because they're parsing markdown on the client or some such absurdity, and they don't even display the raw pre-markdowned text if you load it without JS because instead of doing the (relatively) sane thing of putting the text into the HTML and parsing it and replacing it, they store the entire thing as a JS string. I mean, really, if your solution is "make every client that ever visits your static website duplicate the same work (and load in massive libraries to do so, to boot) that you could do easily server-side once", you're asking the wrong question.

[gnaritas]

> Your analogy fails. Javascript is designed to be an addon to HTML / CSS.

Your analogy fails because you think the original design intent matters, it does not. What matters is how people use things, not how they were intended to be used. His analogy was correct, developers do build their sites with js capabilities assumed and if you remove those abilities you break much of the web today and you know it.

[amalcon]

The issue is that plain HTML+CSS is literally designed for this use-case. The only thing Javascript can possibly do is reinvent the wheel.

It's more like complaining that my car isn't allowed drive on a particular road unless I allow them to install a special additional windshield. It serves no practical purpose, and is just duplicating effort. Sure, it may work, but there's no reason to do it.

[kazinator]

Yes, if CSS starts becoming powerful enough to do become a security hole, it will become imperative to selectively disable it, or at least its new, unsafe features.

[kazinator]

People who use tools like NoScript are helping promote better security around the entire web. When my browser executes malicious code, it attacks someone else. So it's not just for my benefit.

As a web developer you can help by:

- not pulling JS from a dozen different sites. Host whatever you want me to run in your own domain, as much as possible.

- detect that JS is disabled and put up some warning, like "site requires JavasScript".

- Say which Javascript (from which domains) are used for what: which are must haves for even basic functionality, and what doesn't work if the others are not enabled. For instance, I've never seen anything break (from my end) if I blocked JS from Google Ad Services or Google Analytics.

[gergles]

I have seen lots of sites (including some major shopping sites) break with GA blocked; a common coding pattern in these cases seems to be an onclick handler that is something like "shadyTrackingFunction() && submit; return false;".

[zhte415]

Degrade gracefully. Or use this as a starting point for functionality: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

[teddyh]

More like the car won’t start because the AC is off.

[technomancy]

Or if your book stops working because you're not using a bookmark.

[voronoff]

The car won't start because you are wearing a personal EMP that is disabling the electronics. While older cars work fine, and some newer ones can fall back to just using analog mechanics, more and more require the electronics to work.

[mpyne]

And yet, somehow I'd be very suspicious of cars that require electronics to make steering or braking work at all. Not everything needs to be turned into fly-by-wire.