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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

Really? Middle clicks (to open in a new tab) don't work.

Edit: turns out ordinary clicks don't work either, unless I enable some Javascript. I've not worked out which of the 10 or so JS sources need to be whitelisted.

Edit #2: middle clicks on the main page still don't work even with all JS enabled.

Edit for downvoters: Recipes should be the perfect example of the web as documents. We literally have books of recipes going back for 1000s of years - what more of an example of documents could you need? You can enhance these documents with interactivity, sure, but the basic recipes can be presented as plain text and images just fine.

The BBC's cooking website works very well without JS.

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I don't think there is a way to ask this without sounding rude, but it isn't my intent, please don't interpret it that way:

Do you really have an expectation of anything on todays internet to work without JS running?

That's a bit of a straw man, isn't it? The homepage is just a basic page with recipes. Without JS, you can't even klick a recipe to view it, that just seems stupid to me. We've had a working tag for that for 20 years now, why would you break it? Sure, you could also build the whole thing in flash, but what's the point?

Yes, it should work. Even if work means simply displaying plain blue links on a solid white page.

At least with rather aggressive third-party blockers in place. I don't expect everything to work, but basic reading, normal pictures and links should work.

I do, and you should too. Enabling JavaScript for all sites is a security risk (drive-by downloads, etc.), and makes far too much tracking crap possible. Since a huge number of sites are user-hostile with JavaScript enabled (loading huge amounts of JS for tracking purposes, that not only slows down load times and uses up precious bandwidth (especially important in countries where ISPs have overage charges for going over bandwidth limits), but also bogs down my computer when it’s still running in the background a minute after the page has loaded. Frankly, if websites are going to be so hostile to the user, the user should have no issues with returning the sentiment; I block JavaScript on all sites by default, and only enable it for certain types of content (like web apps, which you can’t expect to do anything useful without it) or sites that I trust. Otherwise, if I can’t even read a page’s textual content without JavaScript, I just don’t bother… it’s not worth my time.

You're free to want sites to work without JS, but to be realistic about it, that battle was lost loooong ago. Sort of like the old definition of "hacker" vs the one the media has used for the last 20 years.

It's probably more useful to figure out how to make the all-sites-require-js world more secure and less trackable than to try to turn back the clock 20 years.

(Of course you're free to block all JS, insist on how it should ok, etc etc etc.)

“You're free to want sites to work without JS, but to be realistic about it, that battle was lost loooong ago.”

Sites should at least work without JavaScript. Or are you saying we should just throw accessibility under the bus?

“It's probably more useful to figure out how to make the all-sites-require-js world more secure and less trackable than to try to turn back the clock 20 years.”

Blocking JavaScript works right now. Or are you saying end users should just patiently wait until these issues affecting them right now are fixed? It’s not like it isn’t happening… consider how many people have been tricked even by something like this¹. My parents are actually pretty new to the Internet, and I’ve made sure that I have them using something like NoScript. Of course, it breaks some sites for them, but that’s far preferable to them accidentally infecting their computer and putting their financial info at risk.

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¹ — https://blog.malwarebytes.org/fraud-scam/2013/07/fbi-ransomw...

"You're free to want sites to work..."

How do you define "work"?

My definition of not working would be failure to receive a 200 response and some useful content.

The text of every recipe on this site is viewable without Javascript. In my experience, this is the case with most websites today.

I know the Javascript on website must do something to enhance the plain text of the recipe. Javascript is a cool language and I respect the creativity of web developers.

By not using Javascript I may have to forgo the "user experience" the developer has prepared for users, however I still get the text of the recipe. For me, that is enough. In other words, the website "works".

I use NoScript all the time, so yes.

    > Do you really have an expectation of anything o
    > todays internet to work without JS running?

Yes, most of it works just fine. Larger sites tend to have graceful fallbacks sensibly implemented, too.

I assume you are talking about the recipe cards not being links? It's tough to build a linkable card with links inside the card without using JavaScript. The actual html link is the title of the recipe so you should be able to use that if you really intend to not use JavaScript.

I'm in the process of putting together a pull request to make sure the link underline shows on hover (that worked at one point!) and to get middle-click working on the card for users that do use JavaScript.

Thanks for your feedback!

> I assume you are talking about the recipe cards not being links? It's tough to build a linkable card with links inside the card without using JavaScript.

The cards on the main page don't even have additional links in them. And for those with the save/cooked buttons (I assume that's what you mean by "links inside them"), why can't the main elements be linked? The bar with save/cooked would cover them up on hover? What am I missing (Touch interfaces?)?

There's quite a few interactions that don't work right now, even with JS enabled:

Middle-click? broken. (and if you add JS-handling, I hope that doesn't mess it for people that have middle-click assigned to other functions)

CTRL-click? broken.

"Right-click -> open in new window"? doesn't exist, because not really a link.

Again, thanks for the feedback. Right now, I'm literally putting together a pull request to improve this functionality.

Some cards do have links inside of them - they may have external source links or sticker links, and fortunately we just removed author links which will make this easier. I'm wrapping inner elements in hyperlinks which should fix everything that you mentioned.

As I mentioned, for the moment, you can use the card titles which are wrapped in hyperlinks.

Thanks for listening and reacting to feedback :)

I think people downvote because the Javascript ship has largely sailed.

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