Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcameron | Hacker News Reader

Completely white page with NoScript, please add a <noscript> tag

This page follows a typical JavaScript antipattern of not showing anything to search engines, web scrapers and people who block JavaScript.

A noscript tag sould at least tell me, what the site offers when enabling JS, to give me a reasont to enable JS.

And it takes ages to load on a normal DSL line. I dont want to know how slow this page is when browsing with a cell phone.

I just checked. This page not only requires JavaScript, but also a Desktop environment. There is no drag and drop on my computer.

That's a good idea. Why would someone downvote this?

Because it's silly to ask web developers to cater to a specific extension used by a marginal minority of people. Much better to use a more general method for when JS is unavailable.

And people using noscript or similar tools (like myself) should know by now when a page fails to check that first.

A <noscript> tag is the more general method.

But the comment applies to anyone who's not using JavaScript in their web browser.

Although I like programming in JavaScript, there's many people I know that consider JavaScript itself to be a silly extension of what a web browser should do.

And many people, including those who made this website, consider Javascript to be an integral part of what a web browser should do.

Would you complain about a free video game if it only worked on playstation, and you had only an xbox but still refused a free playstation?

But a noscript just tells someone that they are missing out on something. A "hey, disable noscript or enable JS so you can see the page." deal.

Hackers news work perfectly fine without JavaScript.

JS should be an enhancement to improve UX, but not a doorstopper for search engines, web scrappers, and blind people.

Hacker News is a fairly simple site for this use case. It works. However I would not say that it is perfectly fine.

Try upvoting with js disabled. The page has to do an entire refresh. That could be a doorstopper for people with limited data plans or with spotty network coverage.

many people I know !== many people

The percentage of people that considering JavaScript "to be a silly extension of what a web browser" is so small that it would be a rounding error in most charts.

Pretty nihilistic argument as the same is true for everything else mentioned on HN.

2005: Yep.

2010: Ehh, JS is useful sometimes.

2015: Lol no.

Funny, I'd put that in the exact opposite order. Back in the day there were taskbars, popups, visitor counters and what have you, JS was mostly an annoying gimmick. Today it's about actual site functionality, it's pretty fast and (generally) sandboxed.

Derp, phrasing. I meant exactly that. :P

"...JavaScript itself to be a silly extension" "lol no"

Thinking of modern browsers as just document viewers is silly. They're built to be extremely capable javascript runtimes.

Not everybody knows they're using noscript.

Like my friends when they borrow my laptop, for example.

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