Anything that uses JavaScript?

Or allows only the minimal subset required to implement AJAX type functionality.

The argument for expanding web standards has always been "if we don't, then they'll just appify it and we won't have any say" (see DRM debate).

An explicit decoupling of information from interactivity would lessen the pressure for that.

"Anything that uses Javascript" would include, as I said, almost the entire web, including sites which primarily serve text and act as documents, including Hacker News. View the source - it even uses AJAX.

I've just replied to you with JS disabled. I also created this account with no JS (this was a year ago). Upvoting also works without JS.

In my experience, of all the websites that don't work without JS, only a minority actually need it. Most of the time it's silly things like articles and blog posts that just show a blank screen without JS, or drop-down menus that rely on JS even though there are perfectly fine non-JS ways to do it, etc.

"Anything that requires JavaScript" might be a better criteria. Hn gracefully falls back without JavaScript enabled because it's not necessary, just some added convenience.

Even then, sites which lack graceful degradation aren't so qualitatively different from the few that do that they need to be moved to an entirely different platform, viewed from a different device and considered "applications" and not "documents." That seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

What does make sense to me is a new platform based on WASM, with related tooling. Photoshop in the browser or something running the Unreal Engine or .Net is not the web enough to maybe deserve its own thing. But a new platform based on what are essentially complaints about complexity or efficiency would be too messy.

Yes.

Right now there's next to zero incentive not to use JavaScript. And only slightly more to engineer a working fallback page.

Bifurcating the web would provide one.

You're arguing for a technical solution to what is essentially a cultural problem.

I'd argue that the cultural problem (sites being VM-tech-heavy) is caused by a technology choice (never saying "this much technology is sufficient for a large part of the web").

Or to put it another way, extrapolated down this path README.txt files on the web in the future will only be accessible with a pair of VR goggles.

A document is static. It's neither necessary nor desirable that we access documents over the internet by contacting their owners. It's better for both privacy and resilience to handle documents over something like IPFS.

The web as we know it is much better suited to applications, where websites have behavior as well as content. Whether the rendering is server-side like HN or client-side like Facebook is irrelevant.

I'd argue that most sites are "documents" that have had "apps" unnecessarily shoehorned into them for cosmetic or financial reasons.

Seems kind of silly to ignore that javascript enables much more robust user interfaces. It can and is used poorly or maliciously, but it's used for far more than cosmetic or financial reasons.

What is "much more robust" even supposed to mean? It sounds like meaningless marketingspeak. The countless number of sites that break the back button, scrolling, general navigation, showering my eyes with distracting animations, or show some stupid popup when I select text make me lean towards the UI being much better without JS, and indeed I keep it off by default.

I once had a site beg me to enable JS "for a better user experience", one which didn't need it to work. I did, and promptly turned it off again when I realised what the "better" actually meant (see above). Not going to fall for that one again...

When I want to read an article in a newspaper, I don't need a "robust" user interface, I need the text and (sometimes) the pictures. Links to other relevant content are a bonus. This could be done with the very first web browser.

Yet for some reason (hint: money) newspaper websites load megabytes worth of scripts to display kilobytes of text.