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Comment by dubcanada | Hacker News Reader

It's fun... He's a developer who enjoys doing stuff, it doesn't matter if it has a purpose. To him it does, and he has enough followers that he felt he should share it with people, which makes sense considering I can't wait to see the result.

And I'm sorry, but if you turn off javascript this day and age you should expect more sites to not work then to work. You're turning off part of the browser, and you do not like having to turn it on to use the browser? Seems a little backwards to me... considering the extremely small population of noscript users.

I also understand that I'll probably get down voted into oblivion as every single noscript users is probably on this site. But it's true...

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It's reasonable to expect disabling javascript to have a negative effect upon a webpage which is performing some relatively complicated function. If I was running noscript, with no whitelist, and tried to use Google Calendar, I'd expect reduced or zero functionality.

But Twitter's main purpose in life, for end users, is to display text and links. There's absolutely no reason why disabling javascript should cause a link to be inaccessible. This is a legitimate complaint.

And websites are also not just text and links anymore. Twitter would probably have to put man hours into making what ever work for noscript, they don't just do something for no reason. But spending effort even thinking about users without javascript is in my mind a waste of effort.

Anyways I agree that he should still be able to see text/link. But I turned on the site in Google Chrome, with javascript turned off... And it worked perfectly fine. He however has "noscript" which does not work that way, and does stuff preventing the site from doing normal functionality... Completely his fault.

Not a waste of effort, just one more step away from the roots of the web. If someone can't gracefully degrade images, text and links they are a failure of a web developer and have betrayed what the web should stand for.

>And websites are also not just text and links anymore

Twitter is. Twitter is an absolute clusterfuck technology wise, they are the prime example of doing everything wrong. Defending their idiocy does not reflect highly on you.

I think he was just surprised that something like a simple link needed Javascript.

No, I'd agree. I've stopped building <noscript> tags into my sites as virtually every browser supports Javascript now. If folks are smart enough to turn off Javascript they're just as capable of turning it back on.

I personally block Flash by default (mostly to stop audio ads), and I have no problem turning it back on when a site requires it.

Folks don't want to turn it on, because it's not needed for most cases and it's the perfect way (after flash and java) to get malware.

I don't know what's happening to web development, but since this app fever developers are fighting for eye candy and LESS accessibility. Sometimes I see a page that fails to work without JS, open the source and see just JS code. Where is the content? Web apps are often times also walled gardens, and completely break the functionality of the browser (based on linking, rendering text & images and using the back button).

Now even simple websites completely disable access to content just to show some silly animation.

I can't think of a way of getting malware from JavaScript anymore than from a simple link, that's just plain false.

The move to "web-page-apps" is not about eye candy, it's about speed, responsiveness and yes, usability. About not trying to awkwardly force an app down the http/html way.

A broken website/app is simply broken: if things do not work as expected, that's not the fault of webapps per se or JavaScript - it's all doable and not a big deal anymore (the back button thing).

google have a whole competition devoted to the basic idea. it's called pwnium. http://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.ie/2013/02/exploiting-64-...

>The move to "web-page-apps" is not about eye candy, it's about speed, responsiveness and yes, usability

No, it is about following fads, just as web development has always done. Creating sites that are slower, less responsive, and offer terrible usability is clearly not done for reasons of speed, responsiveness and usability. Enhancing a page with javascript can increase responsiveness and usability. Replacing the page with javascript is moronic.

There are cases where a "full Javascript" page provides clear benefits (eg, GMail).

Perhaps I should have been more clear. I'm just talking about web pages, basically just information exchange. Twitter being the example here. Browser applications are a different thing, and obviously have to be delivered in javascript. There's nothng wrong with browser applications, but pretending web pages should be built as browser applications is insanity.

GMail is just some text and links too. Why does it get a free pass, but twitter doesn't?

GMail does have a no-javascript fallback, that has all of the important functionality.

I'm reading this in elinks right now. Almost no site linked by hackernews works in elinks, but hackernews still do.

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