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Comment by ergot | Hacker News Reader

What does it do? The about link does not gracefully degrade when JavaScript is disabled, which is bad design.

In ergot's defense, he said the "about link" does not gracefully degrade. Which seems reasonable that someone would want to read what an app does before deeming it worthy of enabling scripts.

I might actually do this from now on. Have my <noscript> be more than just "You must enable JS to use this" but instead actually display useful information about what it does.

Yah I think it's a totally valid complaint. Normally I'm all about telling folks they're not able to use the modern web with JS disabled, but asking for the about page to give a hint with no JS feels like exactly the level of effort everyone should exert for the noscript folks.

Seeing as it's quite literally a JavaScript application, it doesn't do anything with JavaScript disabled.

What sort of things can I do with CyberChef?

There are well over 100 operations in CyberChef allowing you to carry simple and complex tasks easily. Here are some examples:

    Decode a Base64-encoded string
    Convert a date and time to a different time zone
    Parse a Teredo IPv6 address
    Convert data from a hexdump, then decompress
    Display multiple timestamps as full dates
    Carry out different operations on data of different types

This is a web app, not a web page. It's not supposed to anything with JS disabled. It's an actual program that runs locally, without JS no can do.

As much of a problem as I have with web pages using gratuitous JS, it should be obvious that actual web applications such as this and gmail will not be able to "gracefully degrade".

> gmail will not be able to "gracefully degrade".

Actually, gmail in particular DOES have a no-js version.

Go to "Setting," click on "Help," then enter "Basic HTML view" in the search field, then click on "Standard view and basic HTML view," then "basic HTML view," then, if you wish to preserve the setting, on "set basic HTML as default view."

OK, fair enough. But that's a huge effort to duplicate an app like this with a server-side version, and much less user-friendly as well.

Getting all core functionality to work without JS is a huge effort. Getting an about link to show some text is pretty basic however.

If it degrades into an announcement that "hey this is a JS-based SPA for doing <frob> and for more details see <baz>" that would be a good start.

That would be ideal for a web app like this.

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