April 24 is JavaScript Naked Day – Browse the web without JavaScript | Hacker News Reader

April 24 is JavaScript Naked Day – Browse the web without JavaScript

js-naked-day.org

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With Javascript disabled the aspect that is a pet peeve isn't some broken functionality of a site (which one would expect) but when a considerable amount of sites add a blank overlay until JS and/or cookies are enabled.

And not the scenario where JS is responsible for loading the content but literally when it's just an arbitrary blank viewport-encompassing element covering the already loaded content—all so the site can then add some animation and remove the overlay when they feel the content should be shown.

It's ridiculous for functionality. When I overhauled a wiki for a project it similarly added such an overlay and I promptly removed it. Nothing on the wiki beside the search was functionally broken without JS yet it required both JS and cookies to be enabled before a user could view anything.

> add a blank overlay until JS and/or cookies are enabled

On many sites Firefox "Reader mode" can work around this.

Cloudflare will block new visitors as there will be no captcha to load.

That depends how the site is configured in Cloudflare.

They don’t want you there, they are poorly designed sites, and you are better off leaving them.

No, JS is part of the web. You wishing it was not does not mean it isn’t.

A site isn’t broken if it doesn’t work without JS anymore than it’s broken if you disable TLS or CSS or any other part of the web.

I didn’t say it was broken, I said it was poorly designed.

The internet is decentralized. I won’t tell you that you have to ignore the parts that have been infected by JavaScript nonsense, but you’ll be happier if you do.

Next up: CSS naked day?

Seriously though, I respect the ideal of using HTML as much as possible for what it's made. But the web is more than just pure content sites. And Javascript provides a lot of nice things as well.

The web is more than just pure content and, yes, some of it requires JavaScript to function. But it's a lot less than sites actually allow for. We shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of much, much better than the status quo.

From the website:

> JS Naked Day started because we were jealous of CSS Naked Day.[0]

[0]: https://css-naked-day.github.io/

Per the article, CSS naked day was the inspiration.

https://css-naked-day.github.io/

There are certainly web apps that could not function without JavaScript. This initiative is more of a protest to shoving functionally useless JavaScript down your throat when you browse a news site or read an article.

JavaScript should progressively enhance those types of websites, and not be a strict requirement.

I think they block everything for awareness. “Use a reasonable amount of JavaScript day” would not be very memorable. In actuality the right thing to do is leave JavaScript blocked by default, and then think critically about whether or not you trust a site enough to download and run a random program from it. If so, then JavaScript could be enabled.

Ah, haha, CSS naked day was actually first? I do have to admit that most of what I do on the web is consume content and there most JS like analytics and ads is useless to me. So I guess I might actually try NoScript for a day after all.

Completely disabling JavaScript is a no-go these days. But Firefox+NoScript is both enlightening and refreshing. Did you know that CNN tries to run JavaScript from more than 30 domains on the front page, but is functional and ad-free after enabling 2 or 3?

The Add-on allows you to enable or disable specific domains serving JavaScript, and automatically save those preferences for later visits. I find that I only notice the add-on for a few days on a new device before it is tuned. After that, the only thing I notice is how slow and garbage-laden the same sites are when I'm on a computer without my setup using e.g. Chrome

YMMV but I have been NoScript-ing for 2 years and won't go back by choice.

> Completely disabling JavaScript is a no-go these days

Wrong. I use a browser in a VM when needed, and I don't do that very often, maybe once or twice a day. No ads, fast static text, low cpu, very safe, it's pretty damn good.

If you need to dip into another browser once or twice every day, you’ve basically proved that you can’t in fact operate entirely without JavaScript.

ISWYM. I operate 95% - 98% without so, close. Am very happy with it.

> Did you know that CNN tries to run JavaScript from more than 30 domains on the front page, but is functional and ad-free after enabling 2 or 3?

Might try https://lite.cnn.com.

If you use uBlock Origin (and you should!), it can be configured to work in a similar way. NoScript does have some extra features though.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-qu...

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-hard-m...

IMHO, NoScript is bad because it discourages you from browsing new sites. As you usually need to first spend 1 minute in the NoScript UI to get the site working.

This also makes it very impractical for day-to-day usage i.e. quickly googling something.

Without NoScript, I need to trust a site well enough to download and run programs from it, in order to check it out. With NoScript, I can at least try to use a site.

And how exactly do you establish trust?

At that level of paranoia you should use a separate device. More secure and, more importantly, more time saving. It will pay off in no time.

Or perhaps use an operating system that provides stronger security guarantees like QubesOS or ChromeOS.

If you just browse a site for a little while you can see that it’s a real website, and get a general impression of the place. The set of sites that are both useful, and require JavaScript, is pretty small anyway. So, it isn’t a big loss.

> At that level of paranoia you should use a separate air-gapped device. More secure and, more importantly, more time saving. It will pay off in no time.

This is not a real suggestion, it is an attempt to make my easy middle-ground solution sound ridiculous and impossible by comparing it to something silly like air-gapping my computer. I’m not going for some unattainable perfection. I think the reason people bring this out is that they are uncomfortable with the fact that they are being careless and they want to make even the slightest bit of self-defense sound incomprehensible difficult.

Without NoScript you trust your browser's sandbox to handle whatever arbitrary code is thrown into it. Same as with NoScript, really.

> The web should work without JavaScript.

I don't agree with this, and the site provides very thin or no justification for this claim. "Should" is inherently subjective, so I will not be participating in this event.

It's like making a wrong turn and ending up in an Amish festival...

In the same spirit as this initiative and uBlock Origin and NoScript:

> Decentraleyes is a free and open-source browser extension used for local content delivery network (CDN) emulation. Its primary task is to block connections to major CDNs such as Cloudflare and Google (for privacy and anti-tracking purposes) and serve popular web libraries (such as JQuery and AngularJS) locally on the user's machine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentraleyes

https://decentraleyes.org

And a popular fork which may be more up-to-date:

https://www.localcdn.org

And since it can’t hurt and is useful for the advanced usage and modes of uBlock Origin:

The Ultimate Superuser’s Guide to uBlock Origin

https://www.maketecheasier.com/ultimate-ublock-origin-superu...

which I have submitted as its own post here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40105518

As for no JS - have a look at my PHOOOS technique of out-of-order HTML streaming without JavaScript: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40070792

There is too much JS bloat on the WWW. Let's get back to pure HTML & CSS.

I like the idea of it. Promotes accessibility in cases where bandwidth is limited. Or users have older devices or limited computing power.

I wonder if sites using angular or react will even work without js

edit: while looking this up myself, discovered a design philosophy called: Progressive Enhancement (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement)

If I ever start up my own company. This will be the foundational principle for front end development

Part of this initiative is, I’m sure, to enlighten newer members of the web community to the fact that you can build a large percentage of web pages without JavaScript being required, and that is in fact how we always did it in the past.

Whether or not doing so makes business sense is a different discussion. While I philosophically agree I’m also aware a lot of people have jobs that require being part of the economy of JavaScript garbage at a global scale.

This thing I just looove to see everywhere is $blah_blah$ or \{blah_blah\} or some shite like that. At this point, I should be almost fluent in LaTeX or whatever eldritch tongue these people speak. Perhaps there is a lack of proper authoring tools for MathML? Doesn't Chrome support MathML at least partially these days? I use Firefox so I wouldn't know.

A very worthy initiative. Unfortunately, the CMS my work mandates requires js, so this is a non-starter for me. What I may do, is run my work profile as regular, but turn off js for my non-work profile. I can complain all I like about the work CMS, but that would be fighting a losing battle.

i must be a nudist because every day is javascript naked day

In the same spirit, we should once a year spend a day with ourselves blindfolded, or use a wheelchair to understand what is like to be a disabled person.

I have used noscript + ublock origin for almost a decade now, approving js on some sites is not a big deal and I have had zero issues with malware or popups or other garbage website.

You can tell when a website is a tracker nightmare when it wont load HTML text content without javascript.

> The web should work without JavaScript.

Says who? Perhaps popular platforms like twitter or instagram should support UX based on texting instead of requiring apps. Perhaps emails should be readable plaintext and without images. I could go on.

I love all of these ideas in theory; but in practice the ship seems to have sailed - and in a different direction.

I guess it's a mixture of primordial enshittification and old people reminiscing about good old days.

I added a very similar comment before I saw yours. I guess I can also look forward to being downvoted for having a different opinion.

The only time that javascript is required are when you need some element that is stateful accross data loading (maps, audio player, chat,…) or the action would return essentially the same data with a few difference (voting, autocomplete). There are also some components still missing from the web spec like carrousel (you can probably do some css wizardry) and a calendar widget.

But the current state that wants us to download js files that are bigger that the epub format of War and Peace? Not essential.

> But the current state that wants us to download js files that are bigger that the epub format of War and Peace? Not essential.

Absolutely essential if you want to deliver a large, extensible website (requiring teams of front end and back end devs) with modern UX in a cost efficient way.

It's actually "stop making holidays for everything to try to get attention for dumb ideas nobody cares about" day.

No thank you.

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