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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Yet more vindication for those who disable JS and whitelist it only for a small subset of trusted sites. I should not need to run arbitrary code from a site just to be able to view text, images, and interact with forms.

I remember not long ago I got some confused looks from others for not using the "copy to clipboard" buttons that some sites (which I did trust enough to allow JS on) have around code blocks and the like. They were just as confused why I was not using that "useful feature" as I was why they didn't seem to realise that selection is a built-in feature of the browser that behaves (mostly) predictably and is available everywhere. I'd rather select the text myself than click a button that claims to do it for me.

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I'm also a bit confused by that. Websites can already do just as many malicious things when you interact anywhere else with JS enabled, so I don't see the security argument. They can also quite trivially insert invisible text if they for some reason want you to copy something different than what's displayed.

The main reasons I use built-in copy buttons are: A) I don't end up with bits of whitespace at the start and end of the text if it wasn't formatted well on the website. B) Normal copy-paste in a browser will also copy a bunch of HTML formatting data, which I almost never want in a code snippet. I don't want to have to install an extension just to get plaintext.

Or paste your text into notepad and re-copy and paste.

If you can figure out copying and pasting how hard is that?

Seriously? Why would I do 6 operations (select, copy, open notepad, paste, select, copy) when I could just do one?

The only argument I can see for this is if you already have JS disabled.

The whitespace thing is a bug, too.

It can be a pain but this is how I traverse the internet. I get really annoyed with sites where I have to enable JavaScript to view text. I'm like both noscript and ublock advanced (not together), but much preferred umatrix when it was in development.

You might already be aware of this but use the developer tools of the browser to check for "display: none" or "visibility: hidden" or "opacity: 0" style attributes on some html element (sometimes the <body> element)

Fucking web designers man!

Haha, yeah it's a pain, I've a bookmarklet for looping through some of this CSS stuff to make it visible on desktop. Neither much use on mobile though.

If the text really is there (and is just hidden by CSS), may I suggest Firefox reader mode?

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