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Comment by kintamanimatt | Hacker News Reader

No, that's patently absurd, although I have been known to use w3m while doing work in vim, and I'm super grateful when a site is usable from a text only browser. Screen readers and bots (including search engine spiders) have an easier time with well written HTML.

Progressive enhancement is far better for the end user and not all that hard to implement. Some people choose to disable JavaScript, and there are compelling reasons to do this especially if, for example, you're using TBB and want to minimize your attack surface, as has been demonstrated recently.

JavaScript isn't evil by any means, and it's really important for creating cool shit, but it should never be required. If I can't use your site with scripts disabled, neither can a lot of other people. Sucks to be them though, right?

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> it should never be required

What a ridiculous statement. Lots of things are "required" if you want certain products to be useful. An XBox is required if I want to play XBox games.

Hell you require a web browser just to be able to enjoy the pleasure of checking that "disable javascript" box (though be careful you don't use Mozilla) in the first place (I mean you could use CURL but then you don't actually get to disable javascript).

The point is lets stop kidding around about Javascript here, no-javascript guy.

> If I can't use your site with scripts disabled, neither can a lot of other people.

People who need to disable Javascript are a vanishingly small portion of any potential market, there are many more use cases as far as web apps go where javascript is essential to any decent user experience. Not everything built on web technology is only about content these days. If you don't want to use that technology be my guest, but don't pretend your an important market to people developing on that technology.

> Screen readers and bots (including search engine spiders) have an easier time with well written HTML.

True but two things.

1) Web applications rarely rely on SEO outside of landing pages and a content strategy neither of which should rely on javascript for obvious reasons.

2) Designing applications for disabilities is extremely hard. Much harder than simply using "well written" HTML. Do you know how hard it is for blind people to play most video games? Again we're talking about interactive applications, not simply content. With content there is no problems but as we already went over the web is not only content now.

Edit: One more thought, technically translating the time to the local timezone setting of the browser is "progressively" enhanced. You could always just display UTC time if JS is disabled assuming that was important enough to your users to disable JS (or for bots).

  People who need to disable Javascript are a vanishingly small portion of any potential market.

Depends on who your target demographic is. I'm a "no-javascript guy" and my cousin is as too (well, "gal") for completely different reasons. She's on a rubbish computer not living in the U.S. (read: developing country) so often it's just faster and smoother to browse on a wireless connection with JS disabled. You'd be surprised at how common this is.

I frequently disable it while browsing casually and, for about a month or so, it was policy at work until we sorted out a few in-house security issues (namely browsing etiquette for some of the folks). Our CMS was broken during this time and the front UI was quickly re-written in plain HTML. After that, we sorta left it that way.

  1) Web applications...

The original post makes no mention of "application" or "web site" for that matter.

> You'd be surprised at how common this is.

Actually, I would. I would be completely surprised if it is common (by that I mean at least more than IE6 usage) at all. However, you've presented no evidence of this fact only anecdote. Seriously there is absolutely no evidence that there is a growing popularity of no-js people out there. Perhaps for very specific demographics, in which case I certainly hope whoever is building product for them knows their customer well enough to know that or God help them.

Either way they are not going to be building the latest in interactive experiences or web-based gaming for your cousin with her rubbish computer are they. That doesn't discount the fact that many people are building exactly that these days.

I'm tired of people on Hacker News making blanket arguments like "never do this" especially something as bland as requiring javascript. They have absolutely no clue what they are talking about.

Bottom line is if I (and Google and 37 signals and countless others) can choose to build something that doesn't support even IE8 I can quite happily choose to require Javascript to use my web application. I would be an idiot however if I required it for my blog.

Yahoo Blog on users with JS disabled (stats as of 2010):

http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/many-users-javascript-d...

For clients in the UK, it's a legal thing:

https://www.gov.uk/definition-of-disability-under-equality-a...

http://www.rnib.org.uk/professionals/webaccessibility/lawsan...

FYI: Screen readers nowadays can run JS, but there are hiccups abound. Also I don't recall seeing "never do this", though I did see this: "JavaScript isn't evil by any means, and it's really important for creating cool shit, but it should never be required" from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6176036 . Which, in context of the article, seems pretty reasonable to me.

This all started with when kintamanimatt mentioned that the article's technique breaks Progressive Enhancement, "JavaScript is useful, but nobody should assume it's present."

Obviously, I'll need to get an Xbox to play an Xbox game. I'll need Flash enabled on the browser to play a game built on that. Same goes for JS. But, again, the OP makes no mention of "applications" or "web sites" so I'm not sure why you're bringing up "the latest interactive experiences or web-based gaming" into this.

Honestly this is getting completely absurd so I'll try to be brief

1. You're article actually states how small this is so point taken I guess

2. 99% of screen readers today actually support javascript [1] and as I stated, if you want to talk hiccups effectively supporting the visually impaired is a veritable minefield of challenges and just supporting javascript being disabled isn't even the tip of the iceberg.

3. Finally just this: Also I don't recall seeing "never do this", though I did see this: "JavaScript isn't evil by any means, and it's really important for creating cool shit, but it should never be required". Just read it back slowly, you'll find the word "never" in there if you're more careful.

You are also choosing to presume incompetence of these issues on the part of the author where I see none demonstrated. Even he bothered to explain his, fairly common these days, use case (JSON response processed on the client with javascript). If you want to argue against this sort of thing be my guest, but you're not really going to reverse the trend. Either way it isn't a debate I'm very interested in.

Reductio ad absurdum as they say.

[1]: http://www.punkchip.com/2011/03/why-support-javascript-disab...

The Yahoo link says JavaScript was disabled on 1% of visitors as of 2010.

That percent should be even lower now instead of being higher.

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