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Comment by etiam | Hacker News Reader

Would be nice to have it working at least to some degree without javascript. Good luck!

I think it is running on Telescope (http://www.telescopeapp.org/) which is a Meteor app. As far as I know this makes it pretty much impossible to run without JS.

Why can't Meteor do server-side rendering? The whole design seems almost ideal for it.

It should, but it doesn't yet. It's on the roadmap though.

What's the use-case for that? Are there people reading that using a Lisp Machine or something?

I'd say it should offer some form of API. Then you can use anything to read. Such as Emacs.

If it just used plain markup, I could read it in emacs without building a custom client for the API.

On closer inspection, you're correct.

I thought it would first render the page, then the javascript would take over. It does not seem to be the case, on first load there's only javascript.

At a bare minimum it should work in Emacs's eww. Or at least some other browser, completely written in Lisp.

> What's the use-case for that?

Running without JavaScript is a use-case. Not everyone wants to run that insecure stuff on their machine.

Insecure... how, exactly? It's only as insecure as your browser's parsers for other formats.

The number of browser exploits requiring JS compared to the number of browser exploits not requiring browser JS disagree with your assertion.

The distinction is that JS is a complex and turing-complete language that browsers put a lot of effort into making fast and memory-efficient.

And as a result JS doesn't exactly have the best security record.

1. In the last year, numerous security holes have been found in the JavaScript implementations of every major browser.

2. Even if you assume JavaScript sandboxes are secure, the actual expected behavior of the language is that all code runs in a big global scope. A perfect sandbox would prevent sites from running arbitrary code on your machine, but any JavaScript running on a page effectively has access to all the data on the page. That means every ad, tracker, etc. on the page has access to all the data on the page, including passwords on forms, etc.

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