Hacker News Reader

Comment by iratewizard | Hacker News Reader

Imagine going into a board meeting with the senior leadership of any one of these companies and saying "we need a major initiative to make our site more accessible to 20 people who block all Javascript and probably have contempt for us." Then tell them how much it will cost.

View on HN

This is exactly it - by limiting javascript you are choosing to be in a minority of users and then demanding to be catered to. You're just setting yourself up for disappointment.

These are businesses - they write code to generate profit. Their support of limited javascript has no impact on profit, so they won't do it.

Or as developers we be good stewards towards the web and the feature isn't complete until it's tested to at least not completely bug and give an error message when a script or resource isn't loaded.

You're not going to delete a dll or not install DirectX then get annoyed when the software fails.

I'm not familiar with Windows but I'm going to assume the OS will at least give you an error. A lot of websites are just blank and/or swallowing errors without giving feedback.

Oh this is true. Rereading your point that an error should be present is something I agree with.

It feels more domain to the browser. Have some sort of required flag.

If you get to unilaterally make technical decisions in your company with complete disregard for return on investment, then be my guest - but I'd look for other jobs because companies that prioritise developers complaining over profit tend to go bankrupt.

The rest of us don't want to be fired.

I'm not saying make it all work without JS. Provide a noscript tag and actually handle your error states. These are basic best practices. If you get fired for not swallowing errors, I don't know what to tell you.

But that's not what the article is complaining about - they're complaining that most of the UI functionality doesn't work without JS. To make it do so would require a progressive enhancement approach, which is not going to sell well if the only benefit is an extra 0.1% audience reach.

Then perhaps we're not at odds because full JS-disable support is often unreasonable. My gripe was that many of my own experiences using uMatrix with scripts disabled by default ('cause you never know what sort of modals and pop-ups and other junk random pages send you) and not getting even the slightest feedback on what went wrong. I'm aware that this is a minority setup, but throw a user a bone. I've been banned from signups because I failed a third-party CAPTCHA I never saw. I enable JS manually on almost every site once I get an error and it's vaguely trustworthy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com