Would that ruling mean that sites could no longer refuse to show content based on how they're accessed? For example, sites that won't load if the browser is in headless mode, or sites that depend on javascript as a way of blocking wget/curl.
There is no reason why your page should refuse to load plain text without Javascript enabled.
On a technical level sure. SPA's should pre-render data before sending it to the client.
The problem is that's a ton of extra work when the client will have to fetch data anyway - so it's difficult to justify the time to management.
EDIT: If their page fetches the data with JS you might actually have an easier time figuring what their API looks like instead of scraping the rendered page. You might find there's more data available than is rendered too.
Sure there is. You prefer writing javascript and you want to serve your site through a CDN.
You might not think that's a good reason, but that's certainly a reason.
I've often wondered when the laws would start to be applied and I think its coming
and that was 7 years ago. There may be certain complicated interactions that are a challenge for screen readers but simply because a page relies on JavaScript for rendering doesn't automatically mean it is inaccessible to screen readers.
This is a really good resource: https://accessibility.18f.gov/
A lot of frameworks now have some accessiblity built in if you add the correct attributes.
There are plenty of real ways that sites are unusable by screen readers, using Javascript to download dynamic content shouldn’t be one of them.
As soon as your application bundle is rendered on your servers dynamically then only part of your site can be delivered via CDN.
Basically going all-JS gives you an app model where your sever side code doesn’t even know or care about HTML or the web or whatever. It just pushes JSON or whatever around and it largely client independent.
Great model when you need to support iOS, Android, web, desktop.
For many SPA's the only actual html is a header, container div, and a call to the app's js. Ignoring the header there might only be say half a dozen lines total.
> google-chrome --headless --run-all-compositor-stages-before-draw --virtual-time-budget=25000 --print-to-pdf='foo.pdf' URL
Edit: Plus
> pdftotext -raw foo.pdf
Of course there is! It’s my site and I can do what I want with it.