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Comment by franze | Hacker News Reader

is the unobtrusive javascript paradigm dying or already dead?

From the link: Degrades gracefully if JavaScript is not enabled

Graceful degradation is less common for JavaScript now than it used to be though. So if you want a smooth web experience, these days you just can't go without JavaScript. I personally don't think that's a horrible thing, but I guess most people who've disabled JavaScript (or use Lynx or something) would disagree.

I think that's just a result of lazy programmers. Most of the sites I put together work with or without js. It's not that hard to do with a good templating engine that splits up each "ajax" part of html into a piece that can be rendered with a refetch of the entire page, or a refetch of just that part.

i.e.: http://twigkit.github.com/tempo/examples/twitter with no-script turned on http://yfrog.com/h2g6vcqj well, i'm not quite sure how "Degrades gracefully" is defined, but i would not call the no js-version "gracefully"

The only thing I was still using Lynx for is for downloading graphics drivers on Linux. Alas, since NVIDIA did their last site update, that doesn't seem to work anymore :(

I think that if your site has a clear-cut function, you should at least try to provide that functionality even for bare-html browsers. Doesn't matter if it looks ugly, the focus is this case is on functionality not looks.

Javascript is pretty much necessary to browse the web these days, unless you stick to things like wikipedia, and only write text.

I haven't had big troubles for browsing the web, though interacting with it (e.g. posting stuff in comment areas) is more problematic. Looking at the sites I regularly visit, all can be browsed fine without js: Wikipedia, HN, Reddit, Twitter, any Wordpress blog, Slashdot, Google News and just about everything it links to, university professor/project websites, etc.

In fact, I can't think of a site I regularly visit that doesn't work without js, except for things clearly in the category of "web apps", like canvaspaint.org, where the idea of "browsing" them doesn't even necessarily make sense. Even gmail works without js!

Just out of curiosity, why do you browse without javascript?

I don't regularly anymore, but until a few months ago my main portable coffee-shop machine was an old 12" Powerbook G4, which was a lot snappier with js turned off, especially on a few sites whose dynamic versions were slow as molasses, like Slashdot. Probably close to a worst case for js, because not only was the machine slow and low on RAM, but browsers use old fall-back js engines on PPC.

I also use 'links' from a terminal on occasion. It's gotten increasingly hard to use, but mostly due to layout issues rather than js, afaict.

I feel necessary to point out that the sites you regularly visit seem to fall in two broad categories. Wikipedia, Slashdot and so on are enormous sites with vast user bases and advanced JS, where any JavaScript functionality has to be backed up with plain old HTML or the site becomes unusable for a significant number of people. University websites are in my experience much smaller sites with a very strong emphasis on factual content and almost no JavaScript at all in the first place.

The problematic sites are going to be the middle ground - large-ish sites with reasonably competent web developers who have higher priorities than supporting the 1% of users who have JavaScript disabled.

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