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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

I don't care so much when a site with lots of interactivity requires JavaScript, but holy heck, do few things piss me off more than a blog site with articles that require JavaScript just to read text! Whomever writes web software to do that should be ashamed of themselves.

If it's really that hard for you to prerender a page on the server, then just send the text by itself. Can you do that? I don't need you to prerender your header, your footer, your menus, or any of that junk. Give me the text body. Place it in an element your JavaScript code can replace when it boots, if I choose to let it run at all, which I won't if I can avoid it.

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Just out of curiosity - why is this such a big deal? Personally, as long as the page has a good UI, I couldn't care less if it is being prerendered or not.

The comment you replied to says

> if I choose to let it run at all, which I won't if I can avoid it.

It's not rare for people with a security/privacy background to only allow whitelisted sites to run JS.

And - what's the point? Websites that want to track you will track you anyway, there's a whole array of technologies that will let them to, and won't display anything to you if you don't run JS. Security objections are pointless, it's not 2001, JS is not anything new, and it's not at all a security risk, browsers are sandboxed and well isolated.

The objections to JS on security grounds are not about tracking. Browsers doing JIT are not as isolated as you may wish them to be.

The point is that you're not supposed to receive the text by itself, the text is only there to entice you to visit the site, but you're supposed to click links, subscribe to the newsletter, get tracking scripts served to you, and buy whatever product/service they're luring you towards with those blog posts.

Nowadays every marketing person will strongly insist on producing tons of semantically meaningless "blog posts" just to generate some new "content" on the site so that google ranks it higher. The blog very rarely exists for you to just read it, most of the time it's a marketing tool supposed to steer you towards something else, and it's not in their interest to allow you to just read the text without the accompanying cruft.

I agree with you.

I block JavaScript on my own site just to make sure.

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