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Comment by aw3c2 | Hacker News Reader

Attention readers: For some reason i cannot comprehend the pages use javascript to load some images. There are no noscript elements notifying you about this. So enable javascript to read through this.

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Attention readers: For some reason I cannot comprehend people use the internet in 2012 with javascript and cookies disabled and then whine when some things don't work.

Poor[1] Javascript can hamper accessibility. Some people need to get the content in a way they can access. Sometimes those people will need to turn off bits of javascript to allow their assistive tech browser to find the content, or to allow their hardware to find the links for clicking, or to keep the user experience similar to what their used to, or etc etc.

Computers in 2012 are less powerful than a few years ago - many (most?) people will be using tablets or smart phones and thus using ARM processors with low clock speeds. Internet connection is also problematic. People may be using nice fibre-optic broadband with low contention. Or they may be stuck on dial up. Or in a country like Australia with very expensive connections. Or on mobile connections with poor bandwidth and high charges.

[1] I'm not saying this website's javascript is poor.

FYI, some people use NoScript to pick and choose which JavaScript they allow to run.

The images are not loaded until you scroll them into view, so bandwidth is saved if you don't read the whole article.

In that case the noscript fallback should be loading all immediately.

That's true. It seems like javascript disabling is just not on the minds of web developers. You have to be a special kind of masochist to use noscript these days... I used it for years, but ghostery covers most of what I liked about it.

I don't use noscript (if you mean the Firefox addon). I was talking about the <noscript> tag. ;)

I use Opera with Javascript and Cookies disabled because most things work fine and are much less annoying with that setup.

Well I guess the overall improvement must be worth images not loading on this page and whining on HN. So, what's the problem again? O you think your setup should be added as an edge case, sorry non standard setups are often not worth catering to. If you want it to work just enable scrips, it's not that hard.

I did know what you meant by noscript, just using the plugin as an example of non-javascript users :-). No cookies? You are a masochist. Another reason I like ghostery -- it blocks the cookies that I don't like.

From sohn, who is dead:

"That's bullshit. What if my connection is slow and I want to leave the page loading whilst I do some other things."

Scroll the page to the bottom, scroll it back up, then go do your other things.

Of course you have to know to do this.

I figured it out after about 15 seconds from seeing one of the images load on-demand. Which is the time any self-respecting computer programmer should take.

I load links as background tabs and visit them later when I am on a slow connection. When sites do things like this I end up viewing the site for the first time several minutes after clicking on it only to find that I had been waiting for nothing.

Thanks for the snark though.

Right, I'm in a position such as yours every now and then. Now I understand that you meant that you can't possibly know you have to force the images to load because you have not looked at the tab yet.

> Thanks for the snark though.

I appreciate taking it in good nature :)

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