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Comment by neya | Hacker News Reader

It's simple. Don't use frameworks for content consumption. It adds no value to the end user. No, I don't need your full fledged my-data-sucking SPA just to read an article on your site. Keep it simple.

The best example?

https://www.react.rocks is a site built on react to advocate people to use React.

This is how it looks like without JS.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WRll6h...

A site built on React to advocate React doesn't serve its primary purpose. The irony.

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I don't understand your complaint here. Your issue is that a site written with a JS framework doesn't load without JS? The HN anti-JS brigade will never cease to amaze me.

You think the 0.001% of people who browse with JS disabled are the primary target for such a website?

>You think the 0.001% of people who browse with JS disabled are the primary target for such a website?

Because you obviously grabbed this number out of thin air, I would like the HN community to know that the actual percentage of users without JS is much closer to 1%[0].

[0] https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missi...

Do you have any updated sources? This data is from 2013.

No I don't, unfortunately. But I imagine that this figure will be fairly stable for the foreseeable future. There are always going to be people with disabilities who turn off JavaScript for accessibility reasons, and privacy-conscious individuals and corporations that have it disabled.

I think the parent comment's exaggeration of the number is bad form for web developers, and goes against the spirit of the web, which I believe is based on the principles of universal access and inclusiveness.

I have no data here, I would guess that number would be lower today than in 2013. My reasoning being the proliferation of smart phones in second and third world countries and the general trend of more web 2.0 users, though I fully accept that this is just an educated guess.

As a web developer, for me the problem is that writing anything modern without JavaScript is a much harder task that only really benefits a small minority of users. I'm unfamiliar with any disabilities that would require JavaScript to be turned off but I could see this being a valid usecase.

Just found this from 2016: https://blockmetry.com/blog/javascript-disabled

That post also implies that the figure is stable.

Your second paragraph is a perfect example of the kind of attitude that I think is problematic. Yes it's more work to accommodate non-JS users. But so is building ramps for people in wheelchairs. The discrimination gets "baked in" to your/our development processes, and you/we justify the discrimination based on the idea that the only ones who will suffer from it are a "small minority".

It's like assuming that everyone uses a mouse. Clearly some don't, and if we develop the web based on that assumption, we're going to leave a lot of folks in the lurch. We should hold ourselves to a higher standard[0].

[0]https://webaim.org/standards/wcag/checklist

Could you elaborate on the a11y benefits to disabling JS?

This is a shot in the dark as I don't use any a11y tools, but, when you load sites and block javascript, you often gets much simpler markup, which is useful for finding the content you want your screenreader to read.

You don't understand, the primary purpose of a website is to deliver content to its intended audience and if your framework doesn't provide you a failsafe way to do that, then there's no point.

The link I provided is from Google's cache, it isn't only about visitors with no JS. It means, that's exactly the way Google sees that page. So, what's the use for your "my-awesome-hipster-powered-react" site if it can't even get indexed by search engines and solve its primary purpose of displaying content?

All of that loading time to show a site that has an index page and a single item page, poorly designed/styled. lolz.

So are you against frameworks or JS?

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