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Comment by inetknght | Hacker News Reader

Can't view with javascript disabled. !@#$ that.

Not to be rude, but honestly can you view anything with JavaScript disabled anymore? I don’t exactly blame the website.

A very large amount of websites can be used without JS.

Microsoft have stopped giving a damn a long time ago, and require JS from a dozen domains just to display a bunch of text documentation.

They're definitely worse than your average JS-only website.

This website, as one example.

If you're genuinely curious, then I highly encourage you to try it out. For me, I can view almost everything I want and am much happier with javascript disabled by default and enabled only when needed.

Does it help you bypass paywalls? Asking for a friend.

Don't know, kinda doubt it though.

Why on earth should you give every document you open arbitrary code execution rights?

It'd be a little hard to show a PPT without some js viewer.

How so? the arrows could just point to the next page, there's zero interactivity on that PPT.

If only we could invent a way to show static documents reliably. We could call it, say, a Portable Document Format. And we could have a reader for it that anyone could install and see said document. Hm, what a world that would be.

If only PDFs were purely static

or maybe some sort of "markup" that merely needs to be rendered without running any accessory program code?

PDF is a proprietary format. Is it really considered better than JS?

PDF is an ISO standard, it's not proprietary.

And yes, it's better than whatever JS is cobbled together for presentations, of course, it was designed for documents, not blinking things on the screen :)

Yes. It became an ISO standard (ISO 32000) in 2008:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF#History_and_standardizatio...

That hasn't been the case for many years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF

I generally agree with you. But just so you know, in this case if you enable a few scripts, a download button appears and you can read the file in libreoffice or whatever you use.

Yup. It's also just a redirect to a downloadable powerpoint with the original URL embedded in the linked URL. No need to enable scripts at all. Just Microsoft doing their Micro!@#$ thing.

How can you expect a webapp to work with javascript disabled?

Once upon the time there was a thing called server side rendering.

Good point.

Plenty of web apps work just fine with javascript disabled.

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