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by icantthinkofone 4131 days ago
The modern web is scriptable and the days of "no javascript" are over. If you turn off javascript, you are one of less than 2% of the web that does so but you know what you did and the consequences so you also know how to fix the problem.
5 comments
wongarsu 4131 days ago
But the days of accessibility and sane fallbacks shouldn't be over. If a page decides to to generate navigation elements with javascript (like this page), that's weird but ok. But needlessly denying access to anyone who isn't willing or able to run these scripts should remain unacceptable.
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simi_ 4131 days ago
Most of the stuff I read online can very well be plain markdown files. Most of the stuff I _do_ however can't work without JS. The fact that we're so reliant on JS indicates that the "modern" web stack is in dire need of a complete rethink.

PS: Only slightly related, but I'm currently working on a SMTP replacement that focuses on speed, privacy, and ease of use. I believe that if more people would do this, at some point some new technologies will stick and we'd get rid of the (bad) 80s-90s stuff.

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inclemnet 4131 days ago
> The modern web is scriptable and the days of "no javascript" are over.

But why should we accept this? Why does it justify pages like this one, that don't need javascript but deliberately fail if you don't enable it?

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icantthinkofone 4131 days ago
Because the marketing guys want it and to write for fallbacks takes time. While this instance is not about marketing, my point is that turning javascript off makes you one of the few and I would have to determine if that 2% is worth the effort.

Some companies won't target your browser if you have less than 5% market share. Even 10% market share. So imagine when I find out you are less than 2% market share (no js users).

For my web dev company, we have about 10 clients. None of the visitors have ever had javascript turned off that I'm aware of over the last several years.

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krapp 4131 days ago
>The modern web is scriptable and the days of "no javascript" are over.

That doesn't mean the days of "designing without javascript" are over, though. HTML and CSS work more or less the way they always have.

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icantthinkofone 4131 days ago
While I agree pages shouldn't fail without javascript, there are plenty of ecommerce sites out there now that fail without it for the very reason I stated: those with javascript turned off are less than 2% of all visitors.
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pdonis 4131 days ago
If I have to go to a site to do business (for example, my bank's site), then I'll do whatever it takes; if that means running JS, yes, I'll run JS. (And I expect my bank to have reliable JS that isn't going to do something nasty.)

If I don't have to go to your site, and it wants to force me to use JS when it doesn't need JS (for example, when it's basically a bunch of static text), then I'm just not going to visit your site. If that's ok with you, it's ok with me.

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