A day without JavaScript

Re:A day without JavaScript by syrrim on Wednesday June 07, 2017 @12:13PM (#14507563)

Non js users aren't expecting the website to work perfectly without scripts on. The bare minimum they ask for is that the site can be read without using scripts. Obviously it would be nice if all the moving components didn't need scripts either, but most people can accept that this is too much work.

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Re:A day without JavaScript by SquareWheel on Wednesday June 07, 2017 @01:20PM (#14508123)

Depending on the site, even just reading may be problematic. Imagine a webapp where all data is requested and sent as small JSON updates. This is faster and it's less data than full page copies, and can be more targeted to that user.

To build this feature for the tiny fraction of non-JS users, you're looking at duplicating all of this functionality on the server. This greatly increases dev time and complexity of the codebase. It means moving from an entirely API-driven platform to one where your server needs to understand the app logic as well.

Like it or hate it, Javascript is a web standard. You know that websites will break if you disable CSS -- the expectation should be the same for disabling Javascript.

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Re:A day without JavaScript by perilunar on Thursday June 08, 2017 @03:23AM (#14512527)

Websites shouldn't break if you disable CSS - just look worse. The text should still be perfectly readable and images viewable.

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Re:A day without JavaScript by SquareWheel on Thursday June 08, 2017 @12:54PM (#14515422)

That's an unreasonable expectation. Many websites have complex content and layouts, and no web designer will build their site to gracefully fall back with CSS disabled. That just doesn't happen.

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Re:A day without JavaScript by perilunar on Thursday June 08, 2017 @09:21PM (#14518534)

It does happen when the developer cares to do it; I know several that do.

Website layouts need to be made linear (single column) for display on mobile and the content order usually reflects that anyway. They also need to make sense when using screen readers.

Disabling CSS and checking the result gives you a quick sanity test that the content order makes sense and that the markup is used somewhat correctly. It won't be pretty, but it should be useable.

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