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Comment by CapitalistCartr | Hacker News Reader

"Sorry, you need to enable JavaScript to visit this website."

If you use some style injector plugin (like stylish), you can add this for that page:

    #seckit-noscript-tag { display: none; }

and it works fine... (or you can remove the matching div from the web inspector if you are using a browser which has one).

Aside: That one element is blocking an entire working page for no reason. Where oh where has web dev come to :'(

Firefox's reader mode also works

Isn't reader mode effectively an adblocker and no-javascript mode ? That will parse the html and return only what it detects as the divs you want to read ?

Obviously it won't block js if js is technically required to render the page, leaving you open to security risks and compromising your privacy.

It probably is not “for no reason” – the reason is that the page contains advertising and tracking scripts. The page owner is even willing to lie (pretending that JS is necessary is a flat-out lie if the page works fine without any JS features) so that users enable JS and run those.

In 2013, I created a program to visualize what hosts a web site notifies when it is loaded http://daten.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/src/list-web-bugs.py – you can see the output for the article here: http://daten.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/pics/graphs/web-bugs/w...

Hey, this is cool! Nice work. I am going to play around with this later.

I also have a page to visualize German newspapers' tracking: http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/posts/zeitungs-tracking...

Less than 2% of all web users have javascript turned off. Some say it's less than 1% and it's mostly people who understand the consequences of doing so.

Turning off the native component of anything always has consequences for those tinkering under the hood and the vast majority of those visiting that site don't tinker under the hood.

As the owner of a web dev company, I sometimes consider ignoring the "must work even without javascript" mantra. I haven't yet but there are times.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160729111939/https://www.1843m...

welcome to 2016

What ever happened to fail gracefully?

If you cripple your browser some websites will break. Don't expect site owners to make them work just for you.

Fail gracefully was over the moment the "disable javascript" checkbox was removed from the options menu in every major browser.

My Chrome still has a radio button (admittedly not a checkbox...) that will disable javascript on all sites.

There's a distinction to be made between content sites and application sites. It's really just too much work to try to make an application fall back to plain HTML, but for a content-centered site, like a blog, a news site, etc, it's not that hard to do things right and not require JS.

In this case, the site owner is deliberately sabotaging non-JavaScript users in order to get them to run ad-tracking and analytics. There isn't actually a good-faith reason to require JavaScript here.

The site owner profits from showing ads. There's little business reason for them to show ad-less pages to users. What does good faith have to do with it? They're not assuming you'll hack them or steal their content, it's a matter of business.

> If you cripple your browser some websites will break.

A browser which doesn't implement JavaScript is not crippled; it is 100% functional. A web page which requires JavaScript is crippled, because JavaScript is not required in order to display text and images.

It's the website that's crippled - and intentionally so!

Opportunity cost happened.

You can't run ads or track your users that way.

Yes you can, actually. It's just more work to set it up properly but you absolutely can track user easily server side and you can serve ads without JS just fine.

But you can't automatically relay those capabilities to untrusted 3rd parties. And that's where the money is.

Can you elaborate on there the money is exactly? Is it in selling data points about your visitors?

It is in running 3rd party trackers on your site.

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