Hacker News Reader

Comment by shaggy | Hacker News Reader

I'm a NoScript user and generally only whitelist JS on sites I use all the time and trust. I'm not overly paranoid about security, but the experience on the web with NoScript is far superior than without it in my opinion. What drives me absolutely insane is when a website is 100% useless unless JS is whitelisted. That instantly gets put on my list of sites to never ever go to again.

View on HN

Doesn't that depend on what the website is trying to achieve? Clearly there are plenty of sites out there whose functionality is necessarily dependant on JS. As long as they make clear that this is the case and what the website is supposed to do, is it all that bad if a website becomes otherwise useless without JS?

It's the sites that shouldn't depend on JS that irritate me. Sites that load completely static content, dynamically. Newspapers where you get a blank layout instead of an article. They're more common than you think. I don't mind temporarily whitelisting a site to play with some cool thing but if it's something that shouldn't require javascript at all, let alone need to degrade gracefully, I often just go somewhere else.

And then there's sites like this: http://partiallystapled.com/~gxti/trash/2010/10/09-javascrip...

There are very few sites with a relevant content that are really "necessarily dependant on JS." The worse the content is, or the more amateurish it is, the more probable is that the creator thinks that the "cool menus" are a good substitute for content. It was always so. MARQUEE and BLINK of 1996.

You can almost recognize who's mostly in charge for some site:

-- needs JavaScript only to bring me to another page: some bad "programmer" whose best achievement was that he learned JS.

-- needs Flash only to bring me to another page: some "decision maker" who wants "dynamic" or a "programmer" whose best achievement was that he learned Flash.

- needs a magnifying glass to read the text set in 5 pt font: some "designer" who doesn't care for the text anyway. But look how good colors he selected. And everybody has the same screen resolution as it's on his computer, got it?

-- needs a magnifying glass to read the text, the menus are half JS behind images, half Flash: you tell me, but there's higher chance it's made by a West European guy.

etc.

Yes, it does depend on what the site is trying to achieve. I should have been more clear and said that I can't stand when I am brought to a blank browser (not even a "You need javascript enabled" message). I guess it's not so much that I'm anti-javascript as I am completely anti-stupid web design.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com