Not all websites not using JS are good: http://www.theworldsworstwebsiteever.com/

It is not a question about JavaScript or not. It is a question about well developed site.

At least that site loads quickly, doesn't call home with tracking info, or use up all of my expensive mobile bandwidth.

According to my uBlock Origin plugin, this page does use Google Analytics and Easy Counter.

I honestly think the security/privacy arguments are the only valid argument against requiring JS as standard.

The idea of browsers sending data that the user has explicitly elected to send (in addition to, if we're being pedantic, that the server put there in the first place) is very compelling in this day and age - only problem being that in order for that to have any meaningful impact on web security in the general case, you'd have to more or less universally deprecate JS support, which would set the web in a very different direction indeed.

What about power consumption as another valid argument? Your battery will last longer without Javascript.

That would be a valid reason to provide a JS alternative depending on context, not so much a valid argument for JS-free alternatives as standard.

There will always be something you can do to reduce power consumption: expecting (or advocating) JS-free versions of all websites for that reason is a completely arbitrary line to draw.

It will last even longer without CSS

And most websites that work without JS also work fine without CSS. Almost like a pattern that can be found in properly built websites.

You know - at one time we built plenty of websites - and in some cases applications - using little to no javascript (either it didn't exist, or it was only used for very minimal things) or any CSS (it didn't exist).

So what could we do today? That is - if we purposefully limited ourselves to just basic HTML, and server-side processing, without any (or minimal) CSS or javascript, and only using the (expanded) tag and attribute HTML we have today?

I don't know for sure - but I believe we could create some amazing things.

Think about it this way: Look at what demoscene people are able to create when they put extremely artificial challenges in front of themselves; we could try to do the same - and see what happens?

Perhaps there needs to be a demoscene-like competition space for this kind of stuff (how much can you get done in under 100k browser-side? 10k? 1k? Limit bandwidth to the backend, too, and maybe server-side size of code?).

Just some random thoughts - it might be something I'd have to try myself, but maybe this post might inspire someone to do it as well...

What kind of things are you imagining people would get done with such a limitation?

Recently I was using an expensive mobile connection and I discovered w3m, a text based browser (runs in the terminal). I was amazed at how much faster everything worked.

Most of the sites were still perfectly usable (w3m has pretty good HTML rendering) but some were very difficult to navigate.

My point is, without JS and CSS, the web is just... text.

And when you browse with w3m you realize, that actually the web has always been text. It can be quite refreshing to get all the decorative crap out of the way.

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edit: I now see you didn't say to remove JS, but to challenge yourself to see how much you can make in a tiny amount of JS. Such competitions exist!

web pages https://a-k-apart.com/

java games http://www.java4k.com/

WTF? You do realize most of the users on the internet don't even know what CSS/JS is and would be thoroughly displeased at being presented with a page with no styling. They don't appreciate that the rendering is done without JS/CSS. A properly built website is one that caters to most users, not developers or power users concerned about JS being enabled in 2017.

Why doesn't the market care? Where is the JS-less Facebook/Twitter/Airbnb competitor that blows the customers away with "properly built" websites?

As the number of people that won't put up with the JS crap anymore and start using JS blockers increase, we will see such websites.

Same thing that is happening with ads and ad blockers.

Ad blockers are now going in the other direction with non-intrusive ads being shown.

So far as I know there has been exactly one such ad blocker released, and it was promptly abandoned in favor of the kind of adblockers people actually want to use.

All ads are intrusive to some degree.

I would be extremely happy to use a JS block that allows non intrusive JS.

Privacy Badger is what you're looking for.

https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

In the Facebook case this is supported by Facebook themselves. mbasic.facebook.com :)

It will last longer without a screen too.

>I may be the minority now,

You will also be in the minority later

Sure, but the he only has to wait for the cycle to swing around again. Browsers will officially turn into JS/WASM runtimes. Sites will balloon until instant delivery is no longer feasible. Browsers will respond by allowing sites to version themselves to aggressively cache client code. Eventually browsers will start offering site-specific-browser features to 'new-modern' sites to combat the extreme waste of Electron and the like.

Someone with political capital and influence in the developer world will realize that the web is still mostly text and design a browser optimized for that use case. It will be hailed as a revolution and people will start preferring it over the 'old-web' for accessing static content like news.

Then under pressure from developers pushing the limits of static content they will include a simple, limited scripting language that promises to facilitate basic interactive elements and start the cycle anew.

We should call it something trendy, maybe 'The River'?