Mildly Infuriating

it’s not a hard concept, people.

Depends. Webapps are a thing, and without JavaScript, there isn't much to show at all.

Websites that mostly serve static content though? Yeah. Some of them can't even implement a basic one-line message that asks to turn on JavaScript; just a completely white page, even though the data is there. I blame the multiple "new framework every week" approach. Doubly so for sites that starts loading, actually shows the content, and then it loads some final element that just cover everything up.

I only figured this out like, a month ago! I only became a frontend dev when I got shifted into a new team at work, so I came in with zero prior knowledge and have been using exclusively React and Typescript since Day 1. Didn't even know how to add a css class to something or what tags beside <div> html has until I started a personal project, ran into performance issues (while hosting it in a shitty aws free tier micro t2 lol) and started investigating why my code loads 3MB of Javascript every time I refresh the page.

I'm working on getting better at it in my personal project, might even try kicking React out entirely and seeing whether just Laravel Blade + Livewire already does everything I need. No way that I'm rocking the boat at work tho.

Love it when a page loads, and it's just a white blank. Like, you didn't even try. Do I want to turn JS on or close the tab? Usually, I just close the tab and move on. Nothing I need to see here.

I don't know anything about web development but, is it really fair to say it should work exactly the same with JavaScript turned off? If that were achievable why would it be there in the first place? I assume the graceful degradation concept is supposed to be that as you strip away more and more layers of additional functionality, the core functions remain or at least some kind of explanation is given to the user why things don't work.

I’ve spent the last year building a Lemmy and PieFed client that requires JavaScript. This dependency on JavaScript allows me to ship you 100% static files, which after being fully downloaded, have 0 dependency on a web server. Without JavaScript, my cost of running web servers would be higher, and if I stopped paying for those servers, the client would stop working immediately. Instead, I chose to depend heavily on JavaScript which allows me to ship a client that you can fully download, if you choose, and run on your own computer.

As far as privacy, when you download my Threadiverse client* and inspect network requests, you will see that most of the network requests it makes are to the Lemmy/PieFed server you select. The 2 exceptions being any images that aren’t proxied via Lemmy/PieFed, and when you login, I download a list of the latest Lemmy servers. If I relied on a web server for rendering instead of JavaScript, many more requests would be made with more opportunities to expose your IP address.

I truly don’t understand where all this hate for JavaScript comes from. Late stage capitalism, AI, and SAS are ruining the internet, not JavaScript. Channel your hate at big tech.

*I deliver both web and downloadable versions of my client. The benefits I mentioned require the downloaded version. But JavaScript allows me to share almost 100% code between the web and downloaded versions. In the future, better PWA support will allow me to leverage some of these benefits on web.

The web isn't just HTML and server side scripting anymore. A modern website uses Javascript for many key essentials of the site's operation. I'm not saying that's always a good thing, but it is a true thing.

It is no longer a reasonable expectation that a website work with JavaScript disabled in the browser. Most of the web is now in content management systems that use JavaScript for browser support, accessibility, navigation, search, analytics and many aspects of page rendering and refreshing.

Developers are still familiar with the concept, there are even ideas like server side rendering in react to make sites more SEO friendly.

I think the biggest issue is that there is very little business reason to support these users. Sites can be sued over a lack of accessibility and they can lose business from bad ux, so they are going to focus in those two areas ten times out of ten before focusing on noscript and lynx users. SEO might be a compelling reason to support it, but only companies that really have their house in order focus in those concerns.

Ibuild pretty feature heavy CMS type sites, and though I always try to go HTML only first (I'm quite old school still), it's almost impossible to escape JavaScript

Having said that, the entire "my website won't even show anything on the landing page without JavaScript" should die a quick death already

I thought graceful degradation in terms of web design was mostly just to promote using the latest current browser features but to allow it to fall back to the feature set of, say, 1 or 2 previous browser versions. Not to support a user completely turning off a feature that has been around for literal decades? I think what you're promoting is the "opposite" side, progressive enhancement, where the website should mostly work through the most basic, initial features and then have advanced features added later for supported browsers.

You’re correct, and I’m going to explain how this happens. I’m not justifying that it happens, just explaining it.

It isn’t that no one knows what graceful degradation is anymore. It’s that they don’t try to serve every browser that’s existed since the beginning of time.

When you develop software, you have to make some choices about what clients you’re going to support, because you then need to test for all those clients to ensure you haven’t broken their experience.

With ever-increasing demands for more and more software delivery to drive ever greater business results, developers want to serve as few clients as possible. And they know exactly what clients their audience use - this is easy to see and log.

This leads to conversations like: can we drop browser version X? It represents 0.4% of our audience but takes the same 10% of our testing effort as the top browser.”

And of course the business heads making the demands on their time say yes, because they don’t want to slow down new projects by 10% over 0.4% of TAM. The developers are happy because it’s less work for them and fewer bizarre bugs to deal with from antiquated software.

Not one person in this picture will fight for your right to turn off JavaScript just because you have some philosophy against it. It’s really no longer the “scripting language for animations and interactivity” on top of HTML like it used to be. It’s the entire application now. 🤷‍♂️

If it helps you to blame the greedy corporate masters who want to squeeze more productivity out of their engineering group, then think that. It’s true. But it’s also true that engineers don’t want to work with yesteryear’s tech or obscure client cases, because that experience isn’t valuable for their career.

It is substantially harder to make a modern website work without JavaScript. Not impossible, but substantially harder. HTML forms are not good at doing most things. Plus, a full page refresh on nearly any button click would be a bad experience.

Yeah, it should also work without browser exactly as it does with a browser

Blame the ui frameworks like react for this. It’s normalized a large cross-section of devs not learning anything about how a server works. They’ve essentially grown up with a calculator without ever having to learn long division.

If it's a standard webpage that only displays some static content, then sure.

But everything that needs to be interactive (and I'm talking about actual interactivity here, not just navigation) requires Javascript and it's really not worth the effort of implementing fallbacks for everything just so you can tell your two users who actually get to appreciate this effort that the site still won't work because the actual functionallity requires JavaScript.

It all comes down to what the customer is ready to pay for and usually they're not ready to pay for anything besides core functionallity. Heck, I'm having a hard enough time getting budget for all the legally required accessibility. And sure, some of that no script stuff pays into that as well, but by far not everything.

Stuff like file uploads, validated forms and drag and drop are just not worth the effort of providing them without JS.

JavaScript is needed to actually build anything useful. It is way easier to maintain and when done properly it can be very fast to load and use.

The problem with today's web is that pages are extremely inefficient and bloated. You can keep the same UI just don't try to use every framework and library under the sun. Also it would be nice if people actually formated assets properly instead of using tons of large images and other assets.

i, as a user, should be able to switch off javascript and have the site work exactly as it does with javascript turned on

Not agreeing or disagreeing, but why?

Most don't even know @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark/light), rather cobble something with JS that works half of the time and needs buttons to toggle.

It's worse than this even. I have an old Raspberry Pi 3B+ (1G) that I got in 2018. I hooked it up the other day to mess around with it, it's been maybe 2 years since I did anything with it, ever since I got a Pi 4 (4G). 1 gigabyte of RAM is now insufficient to browse the web. The machine freezes when loading any type of interactive site. Web dev is now frameworks piled on frameworks with zero consideration for overhead and it's pure shit. Outrageous.

I wrote my CV site in React and Next.js configured for SSG (Static Site Generation) which means that the whole site loads perfectly without JavaScript, but if you do have JS enabled you'll get a theme switching and print button.

That said, requiring JS makes sense on some sites, namely those that act more like web apps that let you do stuff (like WhatsApp or Photopea). Not for articles, blogs etc. though.

Nonono, the JS does the money thing before you get your content fix. It's by design.