Comment by m712 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by m712 | Hacker News Reader

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NO. DO NOT ALLOW THIS. GUYS, YOU CANNOT ALLOW THIS. What if I want to browse a site without Javascript? Will I just see an empty page? Why is page structure (for which a language already exists) being moved to a language designed to assist the language providing the page structure? What is the benefit of this aside from writing everything in a programming language as code which your users have to run, esentially making them run arbitrary code on their own computers? This is stupid. Use HTML. HTML exists for a reason. It is not pretty, I know, but at least it's used for its intended purpose. I don't want to visit $website and have to enable Javascript. Content can exist with just HTML and CSS. Enough of this hipster "Javascript is cool and awesome and amazing" crap.

EDIT: To add to this, I need to enable Javascript on celljs.org, then wait 3 SECONDS for the page to load because they use their own "not a framework" to build the page instead of just using HTML.

You're totally right, if a page is merely serving static content with hyperlinks between the pages. For many types of pages, however, that's not the goal, and using JavaScript makes sense. Think of an interactive data visualization, where nearly the entirety of the content depends on dynamic user input controlling aspects like filtering and highlighting.

There are many cases where developers use JavaScript when plain CSS and HTML would do, but there are also many pages that simply do not fit that simple model. And between those two extremes is a large space of application with a mixture of static content and interactivity. Don't focus on a single usecase and ignore the rest.

As someone building a business off of VR in the browser, I think we should always have a fallback. The systems we use for building the web--whatever they may be--should do more to encourage accessibility, rather than leave it as an "exercise for the reader", aka "afterthought". Users of these systems have a legal responsibility to make their site accessible. As framework developers, I think that we must share that responsibility, at some level.

A totally valid use case for this would be to embed a few dynamic widgets in an otherwise-static HTML page. I've been trying that pattern a bit today. It works well, and seems to be a natural fit for this kind of framework. If anything a framework that makes simple plain-HTML apps easier should be welcome news to you.

But yeah, a homepage should probably be a real HTML page with embedded widgets, even if building the whole DOM is a cool use case.

I really wish people focused more on progressive enhancement(?) since 95% of webpages would work just fine with HTML and CSS, and of those 95% only need Javascript for interacting with things.

At least let me see what the site is about, even if only a landing page, so I can see the value of enabling Javascript.

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