People that are in the web since forever and understand how it works and complain about JS are the weirdest form of tech ludites there are. Such a weird line in the sand.
* instant load times
* stable performance
* no tracking, and sometimes even no ads
* no stupid animations that break scrolling, ask you to sign up for newsletters, etc
* no hijacked back button, or disabled highlighting/copy/paste, or pop ups/unders
Unless you're trying to play games, or use some complicated web application like an IDE, javascript offers absolutely nothing of value to you. It only exists to benefit the owner of the website. For 99.999% of web browsing use-cases, HTML/CSS is all that's needed.
The only situation I can think of where javascript has the potential to offer an improved user experience is with infinite scrolling. That's personal preference though, so if it's something you value, I could understand wanting to enable javascript.
(also, I just checked and noticed that Twitter refuses to work if you disable js. Fuck you, Twitter.)
And yet in every thread there's at least one person complaining about the posted link not working with JS disabled.
Sure, if you disable JS you'll have a worse experience, but it's your fault, not the site creators'.
Many people use the web to buy things. Button presses, logins, pizza tracking monitors, they all use JS.
There might be tricks using CSS and images too.
It would be much harder to make them work without JavaScript.
Sites like the new Reddit design, Facebook, twitter etc. are just incredibly slow even on my beefy desktop and it its 100% because of how long the JS takes to execute.
We're off loading the performance hit in developer experience and server side rendering to the end user at the cost of a crummier user experience with many websites these days that strictly wouldn't need JS for most of the functionality. I'm not happy about this trend.
> viewing text/parsing XML
to
> allowing remote sites to execute code on your machine, immediately when you load a site.
That's quite a big jump, regardless of all the browser sandboxing.
Yes, initially the web could only display hyperlinked text. The same can be said for many technologies/inventions, should we therefore never expand the capabilities of our tools? What is the difference between the web and your operating system in that regard? Why are OS APIs so different?
We can also look at the positive effect this evolution has had where what used to be platform specific tooling is now often simply available via a URL. I much prefer that over random executables that are not sandboxed and by default have full access to all your data. Yes, this can be mitigated, but the average user won't.
No it's not all sunshine and roses, we've made trade-offs with regards to performance and UX among others, but this is still an ongoing process as the modern web is still relatively young and changing.
Usually it is people using JS, where they should not and tracking from FAANG and others, which are the reason to block JS. You are painting a wrong picture there.
If 95% of the web devs used JS in appropriate ways and it was not used so much for spying on people, well, then it would be a different story.
I think JS gets a bad name when people use it to make crazy modal popups or inline video ads or change the way the page scrolls. Beyond that it's cool that devs can get really creative with a website and I love coding in JS. But also you're adding a lot of complexity for that. HTML/css are fine for creating a website that communicates information and maybe even looks nice. And they aren't actually a programming language, they're just data. JS is a full programming language and gives you enough rope you hang yourself and I think developers kinda go off the rails messing with their sites and ruin the user experience.
It is cool that I can have whoever execute code on my machine without worrying if it will get privileged access to it. That is a pretty amazing feature of JS/browsers.
Yes that's exactly what the luddites are arguing in favor of, rolling back progress, and dramatically stripping away capabilities. They don't consider any of it to be a net positive, they don't think of it as being progress.
It's not specific to JavaScript, it's far broader than that. It's an ethos.
In my observation they also typically want to go back to not having graphical user interfaces. They like a nice command line interface as a way of life. It seems silly to stop there though. The computer should be gotten rid of just the same to be philosophically consistent.
First and foremost, the luddites you speak of are programmers or sys admins. They have been using terminals and are still using terminals daily, and they see the benefits that those tools have to offer. Namely, they see composable, interoperable programs that abide by the philosophy that programs "should do one thing well" as the bench mark for real progress. I would say I agree with the merits of this perspective. But I still use VSCode in addition to vim, because I'm not a zealot and there are times when I want to edit something in a very flexible way that VS Code better facilitates.
Both ways of doing things have their merits I suppose. It just hurts a bit to see something simple and powerful be wrapped and rewrapped in progressively less helpful proprietary systems and given a JS front end that lacks all of the focus and freedom that charmed us with the systems to begin with.
The problem is that, usually, turning off "current capabilities" leads to a faster loading, lower distraction, less ad-contaminated, less janky, and all around better experience. In an effort to squeeze every ad dollar out of the eyeballs crossing the page, sites are using modern capabilities as weapons against their users.
If sites continue to work js-free, there's a simple switch to enable to improve my browsing experience.
And it even defeats the anti-adblock crap reasonably often.
The modern web is anxiety-inducing and incredibly scary to people that pay attention. I don't want to spend an hour checking the js on sites before I use them to make sure they aren't malicious/mining bitcoin/whatever, so disabling JS is an easy out that preserves my sanity, and gives me a better experience. No cookies, no popups, no paywalls, no ads, no lag.
We ought to be reigning in what JS can do and removing access, not adding more. For one thing, it shouldn't be able to send data without our say-so. It's insecure and spying-enabling by design—why does clicking a link mean the page that loads gets to send my mouse movements and keystrokes to its master? That's crazy, and has been a major contributor to the new norm that all kinds of privacy-invasion is fine. "It's just 'telemetry', what's the big deal?" Ugh.
"That's alarmist, JS is super secure" right, and most folks weren't worried about their CPUs betraying them until Meltdown and Spectre—smart money says there is a vulnerability we'll find shocking in one or more JavaScript implementations, right now, waiting to screw us.
But the vast majority of websites that use React are the moral equivalent of driving an empty school bus to the store to buy a loaf of bread: It's massively wasteful and frankly stupid.
Security too! https://www.vusec.net/projects/smash/
And HTML + CSS3 is Turing complete without Javascript anyway: https://accodeing.com/blog/2015/css3-proven-to-be-turing-com...
I think you could argue that the ubiquity of HTML led to people see value in something like XML back in the late 90's / early 00' and HTML drove XML invention and adoption and not the other way around.
The whole idea of articles, documents, and so on, for the web was semantic content held at a url, crosslinked to related semantic content, etc.
I do understand the idea of SPAs, but not the idea that everything should be an SPA.
This is such a basic thing to refuse that what’s actually weird is that you find it weird.
3 megs of unnecessary data meant that he would sit 3 unnecessary minutes waiting for a page to load.