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Comment by rtkwe | Hacker News Reader

"I disabled one of the core technologies of the modern web and it breaks things."

Please don't be snarky.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I get your point in general regarding the internet, but I'm not clear at all on how Javascript would be required for any of the tasks in this website.

1. Show text content

2. Make the text content look good

3. Allow submission to a comment section

All of those things can be accomplished with some or none javascript. Why make the job harder than necessary? Why screw over screenreaders?

Oh, I see there's a graph there, that probably would use some JS. But why not just hide the graph for noscript users?

Why not pre-render the graph and serve the pre-rendered image?

That'd be even better! I'm not sure how I'd do that off the top of my head, or if I'd bother for a blog post, but it's definitely a good idea.

I think the mouseover behavior on the graph is cool though so having both (one for javascript people, one for non-JS people) is smart.

It's completely inaccessible to screenreaders, though. I just get "Average Monthly Revenue 2012- 2018 canvas element."

I'd definitely make the main blog content display without JS... I don't think I'd do that for comments, in fact, been thinking of making something that only supports browsers with web crypto to do a pbkdf2 challenge in order to submit a comment. From there, would add a few more other pieces to sign said submission including the challenge. Although it would eliminate old browsers (and non-chrome edge), it would probably still be better than most captcha solutions.

Javascript might not add much value to the reader/end user, but it can/might have made building the above 3 functionalities much faster and easier for the developer. Without Javascript we simply might not have all those great content to begin with.

So if it makes the content creators' lives a bit easier, the cost of making the job harder for a small group of end users might be worthwhile.

"Just download 8 megabytes of javascript and wait 10 seconds for a page that's mainly made up of static content and should be under ~1mb and load instantly"

It's mostly text, isn't it? So more like 10kb.

The page load took a second, on a desktop tethered to 4G. Chrome says "1.6MB transferred, 6.7MB resources" presumably because Google Analytics was a cache hit. Much of that is obfuscated-looking Ember containing some SVG and JSON inlined.

A ctrl-R only loads about 20kb but still takes about half a second to render.

The page loaded in about a second for me

20.4 seconds for me, before I could see text at all.

If the SEO people are to believed, a vast majority of people would click away, what, 5 seconds into that?

Just curious, what is your connection?

How long do you think is reasonable to give gmail to load and display my interactive mailbox, on old hardware? It really annoys me.

This statement is only true for certain values of modern web.

"I need 8 megs of Javascript and a loading splash screen to display my own blog article in the 'modern web'".

No you don't.

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