https://openforest.fs.usda.gov/christmas-trees/forests has a pretty heavy dependency on Javascript (read: there's no fallback to anything non-javascript, so I get a white page). It feels like that goes against some of the things that 18F is about.
That leaves only those who have voluntarily disabled JavaScript (<1% of users), but fortunately those users are typically aware of how to resolve the issue of their own creation.
I've worked on public facing government websites (not 18F). We simply don't support this edge case, and our legal department supports our legal right to do so (in particular in relation to ADA requirements).
You mean under 1% of users that intentionally broke their browser?
Seems unreasonable to dedicate resources to that, that could be better spent on 99% of our users. Why should the 1% get special treatment? And what other parts of their browser can they disable that we need to support, perhaps no CSS? Maybe IE5? Maybe they only render XHTML? Etc.
I'd say: configured their browser to work like a browser instead of like a platform to run arbitrary code from the Internet.
Ideally we should be able to trust most of the web sites we visit. The last few years have shown us this is a bad idea, here are my two top reasons:
- security: while I'm personally less concerned with reasonable ads there are a number of problems with ad technology, like infectious ads and creepy tracking.
- a bigger problem for now IMO: poorly written web apps that makes the machine noticably slower.
Anyway, for public facing sites and apps, you may already be doing most of the necessary work for SEO purposes. Letting humans access the version that you're showing to search engine spiders shouldn't be a huge burden.
No, for the people who can't afford to upgrade to the latest technology.
Strongly disagree. Having your page completely break instead of degrading gracefully puts up a barrier to those who cannot run JavaScript (for example, users with older, weaker computers).
It is unlikely that there exists a subset of users with a modern enough computer to even hit our web servers that is under-powered to the point of not handling JavaScript. Our analytics definitely don't show this.
Does your analytics correctly register hits from clients that doesn't support Javascript (I'm thinking about survivorship bias).
Since we keep revisiting this, you might say that you're ahead of the times.
I think we should broaden the definition of accessibility to make websites aren't unneccesarily annoying or invasive for normal users either ;-)
(And yes, making web applications is part of my job.)
This is wrong, of course, because it requires that people buy expensive hardware to use the latest accessibility technology, which is not generally available. It's like demanding that people buy electric-powered wheelchairs instead of making your building accessible to normal wheelchairs.
> We simply don't support this edge case, and our legal department supports our legal right to do so (in particular in relation to ADA requirements).
And I'm sure that ignoring poor people enables you to sleep very well at night.
There are legitimate uses of javascript, but I'm not going to enable it just to look at a document.
Second, it's fine with me if some site wants to forgo my patronage, or provide "a deprecated experience", but not the government.
I certainly do expect my federal, state and local government to follow best practices and provide working websites that I can use without running JS.
I can't think of a single function of government that requires JS, thank God.
Best practices is a moving target. What made sense in 1999 doesn't make sense in 2019. The web simply requires JS, CSS, and HTML today. If you disable any one you aren't compatible.
There's no actual argument for why websites should spend significantly to support a tiny subset of users that intentionally break compatibility for ideological reasons. It is unfair to our other >99% of users who we'd have more time for.
The old arguments such as accessibility aren't correct any longer: accessibility devices specifically support JavaScript (text contrast, HTML organization/order, aria tags, video subtitles, etc remain highly important).
If you really insist on a JavaScript free world you are of course welcome to visit a government office in person, pick up, and mail back a paper form. The website is merely a convenience we offer to you.
Otherwise you'll need an IE 10 or newer browser, on an Operating System that supports TLS 1.1 (Windows Vista or newer), JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.
Sure, but it still makes sense to use JS sparingly. Running untrusted remote code in your browser is a huge nest of attack vectors. I don't think that, in 2019, running JS from the open internet willy-nilly can be described as "best practices", despite the prevalence of it. We're not there yet. If three hundred million people jump off a bridge I'm still not going to do it too.
> The web simply requires JS, CSS, and HTML today. If you disable any one you aren't compatible.
That's, like, your opinion, man.
You're trying to insist that your concept of the Internet is the concept of the Internet. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it's not quite true yet, eh?
> There's no actual argument for why websites should spend significantly to support [non-JS users]
Right, they shouldn't spend more because the tech they use should provide for non-JS users out-of-the box without additional overhead. If devs have chosen NOT to use tech like that then they are at fault, not the user, eh?
> for ideological reasons.
What about for security reasons?
> It is unfair to our other >99% of users who we'd have more time for.
But the reason you have to "spend significantly" to do the right thing is that you chose to use and deploy crappy JS frameworks, not that some people refuse to run your crappy frameworks. This is classic "blame the user".
Now, this is your prerogative if you're doing your own site/app, but the government doesn't get to exclude some people from service just because they don't run JS. Speaking as a techno-elitist, that's techno-elitist BS.
> If you really insist on a JavaScript free world you are of course welcome to visit a government office in person, pick up, and mail back a paper form.
AH-whaaaa? Rather than fallback to plain HTML+CSS you're content to let the user fallback to hard copies and physically transporting their meat-puppet? To save costs? On web development? Where's the sense in that?
> The website is merely a convenience we offer to you.
Well, no. It's an INconvenience you offer me. If you're offering convenience to most people but deliberately excluding some that seems to me to go against the egalitarian spirit of our American government, no? "Unfair"?
> Otherwise you'll need an IE 10 or newer browser, on an Operating System that supports TLS 1.1 (Windows Vista or newer), JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.
I run Dillo. A government website that doesn't look decent and work right when accessed with the Dillo browser is just broken and sad in 2019.
If you do web for a living, you should also know that fallbacks and graceful degradation and server-side rendering all come with a cost. Both monetarily and in terms of complexity.
Yes, I'll Grant you that if you've designed an interactive, multipage form then it is costly to rebuild it to degrade. However, I'd argue that the form was probably unnecessary technically complex and that starting with having a degraded option in the first place isn't additionally costly (and better protects the agency from ada lawsuits).
In the very rare cases that we're talking about a true webapp (i.e. Google docs, or I'll even Grant you GIS (mapping)visualizations, even if it's possible to degrade those), then yes, decisions need to be made on what minimal technical requirements are required. E.g. a government agency offering an application that only works in chrome would be a non starter.
Yeah, iSnow made the same point, but it doesn't scan. "Boss, I can make it work w/o JS but it will cost more..." Huh? Doesn't that sound just like what an unprofessional developer would say?
The fact that so many popular JS frameworks don't do the right thing is part of the JS abuse in my opinion (same goes for accessibility.) Lazy developers wrote half-assed frameworks and other lazy developers chose to use them and then people start to believe that adding JS somehow makes it hard or expensive to do without JS when really they are just doing it wrong in the first place.
> when it's such a small minority of users.
The population of the US is just under 330M, so if, say, 0.5% can't or won't run JS to interact with taxpayer-funded government services that's about 1.5M people. Those folks (of whom I am one) should not be disenfranchised, so to speak, because the gov hired unprofessional developers. The government shouldn't do that, and they certainly shouldn't try to tell me that I'm some out-of-date digital neanderthal for caring enough about web insecurity to disable JS, eh? Lousy devs (as demonstrated by the fact that they can't provide a non-JS web experience/fallbacks at an affordable rate) are precisely the ones the JS code of whom I have no wish to run, and I certainly don't want my tax dollars going to pay them to screw me out of access to the service also paid for by my tax dollars.
> choose between spending their limited departmental resources on an extremely small minority, or the greater userbase as a whole.
Or they could use tech that works for everybody automatically for the same cost, eh?
The "modern web" is dramatically worse (slower, more compute intensive, less consistent, less secure) than the web used to be. This is mostly because of the tendency to force javascript into places where it was never necessary.
At this point, there is no reason to support <IE11 style JS, but JavaScript-less browsers are still A Thing and always will be. Search engines, Opera Mini, various accessibility thing, people with extremely low bandwidth, and weirdos who choose to disable JS are all factors.
Yes, if you're making a webapp, there's no good way to do it without JS and you can just be upfront about that. Also, people who can't use ES6+ are going to zero over time, so it's fine to just write ES6. But you should also have a no-JS fallback version of an information page (anything that's not a webapp) because that's an important usecase that won't drop to zero over time.
and for more as to why: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missi...
They're now building sites to meet WCAG 2.1 which does support the usage of JavaScript for accessible users.
And it doesn't even work with Javascript.