For a while now I have had Javascript (JS) turned off on my work computer, while white listing or turning JS on as needed. I was inspired to do this after reading an article titled, “I Turned Off JS For a Whole Week and it was Glorious.” I placed a link bellow this article if you are interested.
During my time of using the web without JS is just how much faster the internet is to use. Yes, there are many sites that break without JS. Often this is not a bad thing as you can still read the text you are looking for, but other times, the page will be blank, and you are forced to use JS. DX Lean Diet Forskolin
One of the craziest things was the lack of advertising when JS is off. Furthermore, every site that prompts you to please turn off your ad blocker, you can instead just turn off JS and not get that prompt as well as not see any advertisements. This failure to show ads when JS is off reminded me of something the youtuber and Linux enthusiast Bryan Lunduke had said. (I will have links to his YouTube channel bellow the article).
Bryan had done many episodes where he mentioned a failure of the industry to maintain a set of standards that allowed backwards compatibility with older html version such as 1, 2, 3, and 4. We can take this argument into what is good web design. When you create a webpage, you want it to be accessible by the widest audience possible, this includes people with out of date software and people with text only browsers.
Currently, I do not imagine may people turn off or know that it is an option to turn off, javascript; but, the fact that advertisements do not run when JS is off does show that a lot of work needs to be done if we want our webpages to withstand changing software and design philosophies on the internet.
Well yeah obviously. As you’re stopping extra code from loading. Proper web design states that you use HTML for the structure, CSS for the look, and JS for the reactiveness.
Things that rely on the reactivity of a page, anything that does anything, besides web articles, will need JS or something like JS to perform that need. Everything hinges on that.
Indeed. This is because it is very popular. If done properly, the adds will stream in a non-blocking way. Not hurting site performance in a meaningful way. JS is the most popular, but if people get wise to that then they’ll just think of something else.
Please don’t link to him. We are all aware of him.
I know the episode you speak of. He was trying to view modern websites with a browser from circa '95 I believe. Backwards compatibility is one thing, but the original web wasn’t designed for anything more than text in the early days. It does not make any sense to try and use it for something it was not designed to do.
It all depends on what the website/webapp wants to do. If it’s a scholastic site sure, make it as legible as possible. If it’s for streaming video? Pfff, forget that backwards compatibility shit. You need to use the latest standards because the old standards that functionality simply wasn’t there, or it was it was provided via an atrocious plugin-that-shall-not-be-named.
Furthermore, with tools like babel, which transpiles modern >=E6 to the old stuff it makes developing for a wide audience much easier. There’s no way to polyfill everything, but it does cover most things back to as far as IE9 I think.
Absolutely true. However, depending on what goal you are trying to achieve it may be impossible because specific functionality just isn’t there in the severely out of date versions.
Modern web design is not for people with text-only browsers, nor is it for people with 10 year plus old out-of-date software. A year or two or three sure. But 10!? Jesus Christ that’d be a developmental nightmare.
Standard upgrade grade path is every 4 years. I find it shocking that 4 years is not enough time for the average person to run an update. Like what the fuck are you doing to where you really have that much apathy or ignorance.
Mission-critical software in hospitals, scientific equipment, etc, not withstanding.
The normies don’t even know what HTML is, much less JS. And ads can still be shown, with JS, if the content was server-side rendered. See Google’s AMP, React’s NEXT, or Vue’s NUXT, or basic Jade/Pug on raw Nodejs.
The problem with SSR is that the data can’t be sent directly to the client, it has to be sent to the server, then to the client. So it is often more performant to just have the client fetch it and send a callback to the server letting them know they got it.
If a lot of people get wise to that then they’ll just do something else.