CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS

Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by nkassis on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @08:50AM (#12036006)

Days of the old web where flash was pervasive and best viewed in [IE6|Netscape|Mosaic|...] pages were everywhere. Every generation of the web has had really crappy devs building bad experiences. The current generation is not making anything worse than it's predecessor.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by inanutshellus on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @10:02AM (#12036464)

My current-favorite problem with modern web development is mobile-specific redirection.

e.g. you click a link in your email and it takes you to "www.foo.com/somethingWithParametersAndImportantStuff", foo.com detects you're on a phone and redirects you to their mobile homepage at "m.foo.com", blowing away your URL or even better not supporting your particular URL's page in the mobile site... where... your mobile browser could've just rendered the original site, albeit pinched.

It comes to mind because I'm currently dealing with this as an issue with UPS.com. We're halfway to 2017, people! How can we be having these problems.... :-)

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by jdmichal on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @10:57AM (#12036855)

http://xkcd.com/869/

Anyone know where I can find publication dates for individual comics? I don't see anything on the comic's page.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by WorldMaker on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @11:14AM (#12036984)

For questions like that I tend to jump over to the Explain XKCD wiki.

This comic was March 7, 2011.

http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/869:_Server_Attent...

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by nandhp on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @12:28PM (#12037601)

The archive page -- http://xkcd.com/archive/ -- has each comic listed by title, with the publication date in the hover text. Server Attention Span was published 2011-3-7.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by jdmichal on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @01:12PM (#12037941)

Ah, I found the archive page but didn't think to check the hover text there... Thanks.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by marcosdumay on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @02:06PM (#12038295)

It's hard to search on that forum!

http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=69169&hilit=serve...

It's from some time around Mar 07, 2011.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by JoeAltmaier on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @10:06AM (#12036492)

Digression: 'clicking on a link' may become an obscure reference soon, like dialing a phone. How many young people ever use a mouse?

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by sanderjd on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @10:28AM (#12036631)

I'm very curious about this: is there a hypothesis that non-mobile computers are going away in the business world and/or that "young people" will not be involved in that world? I don't know the stats - are tablets making big inroads in business computing?

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by WorldMaker on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @11:27AM (#12037065)

Humans have several millennia of evolution "touching things" for tactile feedback. Mice on the other hand are a relative (and quite useful) hack compared to that. It requires training and a different mental dimensional model to use. To a child growing up with modern touch screens, a screen without touch is the aberration and "broken". Mice may not disappear entirely, but certainly more and more screens in our lives will support touch interactions, even on desktops and "non-mobile computers", simply because it requires less training and feels more natural ("touch the button" versus "move the mouse to the button and click" may not seem that different after decades of mouse usage, but are very different experiences to an untrained person). There's a sense already today that kids growing up with tablets find mice strange and annoying ("Why can't I just touch that?"), and it's easy to wonder watching today's kids if mice will last for more than a footnote in history and in increasingly small niches that require "headshot precision" like games and maybe CAD.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by JoeAltmaier on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @10:33AM (#12036674)

Dunno. But my niece and nephew are tablet/phone experts, and have never used a mouse. And they are 4 and 6.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by MichaelBurge on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @11:25AM (#12037050)

If it comforts you, I used an upside-down SNES gamepad for a few years before ever touching a mouse. And today I use my mouse far more than any game controllers.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by mitchty on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @12:17PM (#12037499)

I'm more curious why it was upside down.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by MichaelBurge on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @12:39PM (#12037677)

I just grabbed one and starting using it upside-down. By the time anyone told me it was wrong, it already felt more natural to use it that way.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by clarry on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @10:46AM (#12036769)

I think that just means new computing devices have expanded the market, not replaced old devices. Some functionality that was once used exclusively on PCs (what else did you have?) may now be more commonly accessed via mobile devices. You didn't have a PC in your pocket when you needed to look up directions on a map..

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by ZanyProgrammer on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @10:15AM (#12036549)

Any young person ( please define) who has ever used a desktop computer?

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by clarry on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @10:33AM (#12036672)

Well, "your browser is unsupported" is something I still live with. And on the other hand, if I don't have the setup the developer expects, things just quietly break with nothing to tell me what's up. How is that better?

Flash never really was a problem for me; very very few used it for anything critical. It was mostly for entertainment and media that has no value for me. I lived just fine with no flash installed, and got performance & security benefits for simply not having it. Living with JS (and other obnoxious features) disabled, on the other hand, has gotten really fucking difficult now.

And frankly the "best viewed in whatever" websites weren't a problem either. On one hand it was mostly fanboyism. On the other, web designers using some niche feature that had no real impact on functionality or my ability to read & navigate the content. Again, I don't recall ever having to switch to another browser because of that. So it really was better for me back in the day.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by nkassis on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @11:06AM (#12036920)

"Flash never really was a problem for me; very very few used it for anything critical."

Actually there was a period (end of the 90s, early 2000s) where flash was pervasively used to build entire sites. They were worse than single pages app of today. Completely broke browser history, urls etc... Those are similar complaints to today but now that APIs and workaround exit, it's mostly laziness that prevent people from properly building apps that avoid these pitfalls.

"And frankly the "best viewed in whatever" websites weren't a problem either".

There were days where not having a windows machine with IE installed meant not being able to bank online, access university course website etc... This is no longer an issue that I run into much in 2016.

"Living with JS (and other obnoxious features) disabled, on the other hand, has gotten really fucking difficult now."

That used to be the case too with Flash (and java to a smaller extent). Without flash many many sites were completely broken. This obviously got better with time to the point where it's hard to remember but it was pretty horrible to try to use the web without flash circa 2000-2006 or so.

I get that some want JS disabled but it's the only cross browser method of achieving certain interactive experiences on the web. It's not new technology and has been around since the earliest days of the web. The percentage of people with JS disabled is so low (less than 1% in sites on many sites I've dealt with) that it was very hard to justify the added effort to support both (in the case of the sites I worked on, they were large enough that the effort was made). As the web becomes used for more and more use cases, it's going to be hard to keep accommodating a very small minority of users. If JS wasn't there, something else would have to exist to do what it does.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by TorKlingberg on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @09:57AM (#12036440)

"best viewed in Chrome" is getting annoyingly common.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by inanutshellus on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @10:03AM (#12036468)

Bank Of America recently told me it only supported Safari and Chrome on MacOS... But... supported Firefox on Windows. Whaaaa....

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by jdmichal on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @11:01AM (#12036885)

"Support" means they are on the hook if something is broken. Every OS/browser combination is a cost center and potential liability.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by clarry on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @10:33AM (#12036675)

And my bank keeps constantly nagging me that my browser (Firefox LTS) is no longer supported and that I must update immediately.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by nommm-nommm on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @11:37AM (#12037137)

I called my bank because I couldn't log in

"We recommend Internet Explorer."

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by JustSomeNobody on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @08:59AM (#12036059)

>... is not making anything worse...

That's a pretty low bar.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by jdmichal on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @11:02AM (#12036892)

Maybe, but it's an accurate assessment to someone pining for the "old days"...

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by otabdeveloper1 on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @10:35AM (#12036687)

> ...and best viewed in [IE6|Netscape|Mosaic|...] pages were everywhere

We have "best viewed in Chrome" today, which is no different.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by nkassis on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @12:30PM (#12037610)

nope I agree, like I said it's as bad as it ever was. The past wasn't better.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by oliwarner on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @09:00AM (#12036065)

I would strongly disagree with "totally OK".

A crappy, lazy developer won't care about state history. A good developer will. You can do things right if you want to. It's more work but not a huge amount more.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by SquareWheel on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @11:39AM (#12037151)

That's a very outdated view on webapps.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History_API...

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by Hamcha on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @08:58AM (#12036058)

I have to maintain a web interface with framesets and it's much worse than the React stuff I build. Yes it's "one huge js-dependant page for everything", but it can keep track or where it is (and go back to it) using location.hash or path entirely (if the webserver agrees). So I can fix single page apps, I can't fix framesets.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by clarry on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @10:27AM (#12036621)

From a user's perspective, what you [as a developer] can or cannot fix doesn't really matter. What's broken is what matters. I find that with the JS craze we've been living for a few years now, things break a lot in the same way they did back in the frameset days. Except that now it is worse in some ways; with framesets, I could link to a specific frame if I wanted. And I could navigate back and forth too, as long as I understood the mechanics behind it. Now with the JS crapps, it's no longer something I can work around as a user.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by sanderjd on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @10:34AM (#12036679)

> JS crapps

Just as a pointer, using this "portmanteau as diss" discourse style is generally a bad idea if you want to be persuasive to people who aren't sure yet whether or not they agree with you, rather than just "preaching to the choir" who already share your views. The rest of your comment made some decent points, but name-calling like this just comes off as childish.

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Re:CSS is powerful, you can do a lot of things without JS by ceejayoz on Tuesday July 05, 2016 @10:53AM (#12036824)

Every modern framework I'm aware of has either built-in or popular third-party routers that use HTML5's History API to make the back button and links work just like they'd work in a static HTML-only site.

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