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Comment by danielskogly | Hacker News Reader

I wrote about a generalized way to use React, Redux and SSR to make sites that work without JS a short while ago[0] and I’m currently employing that strategy for a side project I’m working on.

So far the biggest drawback is not being able to do a payment flow with Stripe Checkout without requiring JS on _my_ service, because Stripe.js is required to redirect a user to the checkout session.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23426951

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And my response was a big thank you but some serious doubts. I'm asking for no JS when it is reasonable, and what you are trying to do is accommodate my unreasonable requirements. If I may repost past of what I said there:

"I should clarify, I'm only moaning about JS used where it need not be, in the display of text and pictures. Essentially, stativc web pages. There are guys on this thread who are trying to make apps work withou JS and I'm getting uneasy about that - that level of functionality should, and perhaps must, be done client-side or the excess bandwidth and server-side load will become unmanageable. I would still not enable JS to allow those, but I can see why others would."

Trying to allow for extremists like myself, well, you may be doing too much in this particular type of case. Just giving me sensible static websites is fine, I'm not asking for more.

Pretty much this. If you're actually shipping a web app (canonical example being a HTML5 video game), use Javascript; that's what it's for. A newpaper (/ blog / search engine / forum / user signup <form> / image gallery / video gallery (as opposed to player, although that should have clearly marked links to inert mp4-or-equivalent files) / file hosting service) is not a fucking app, but that doesn't mean nothing is. (Note: I don't know enough about stripe to say anything about danielskogly's specific case.)

I completely agree, and acknowledge that there are plenty of web apps that just can't work without JS [0][1][2]. It's the middle ground of web apps that I think might have the most to gain - web apps that _can_ provide their main functionality without JS, like Asana, GitLab, Product Hunt, Pinterest, etc.

[0] https://audiomass.co/ [1] https://html5gamepad.com/ [2] https://agar.io/

I get what you're saying, and for many use-cases fully static websites is all you need. What might have been a better title for my post is "(Coincidentally) accommodating [..]", as the main target audience still remains users _with_ JS. By following some guidelines, using a couple of helpers, and avoiding certain interactions for _required_ interactions - ie. you can have sparkles on mousemove all you want, but don't gate important app functionality behind it - you will _also_ support users without JS. If the implementation cost is low, the potential gain of you and other users who might enjoy a JS-less experience might well be worth it.

For my part, I'm developing a service targeting privacy-minded people, and the ~1.75m NoScript users/installs are then among my main target audience.

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