I find more and more sites using JS for layout and it being an incredibly frustrating experience on my phone. The whole site loads and I'm reading the article for 4 or 5 seconds and then the js kicks in, scrolling locks, everything stops while The page redraws. On some sites, including Android Centeral of all things, this can stop me from reading text I ALREADY HAVE for upwards of 20 seconds while it reflows. Simply unacceptable.<p>ALWAYS keep in mind that people are coming to your site for the text almost exclusively. If your stupid JavaScript interferes with the consumption of said text you have failed as a developer.
Right, but these problems are not specific to javascript requests. Any request can fail, be blocked, interfered with, or partially received. Users can switch off CSS, too. Html page may not load completely. So what?<p>Some of these issues are fixed with https or http/2. Some with CDN fallbacks or just sane coding. Some are not developers problems - such as clueless users installing malicious extensions or luddite users switching off js.<p>Why not ask 'Everyone has html, right?'.
I'm not sure I entirely agree that JavaScript should be developed in a Progressive Enhancement style, for two reasons:<p>If you can live without it (the "progressive" part of progressive enhancement implies that the site is still usable without the JS), then I don't think you should be using JS at all. Semantic HTML and CSS are pretty amazing at adapting content fluidly and dynamically to a wide range of users and devices. Search engines expect documents to be laid out in a certain way. Web scrapers can add a whole pile of usefulness even to sites that don't create explicit public data APIs. You're going to have a serious hell of a time making it any better, and can easily make it a lot worse.<p>And on the other hand, content sites aren't the be-all, end-all of the Web anymore. The Web is increasingly a deployment platform for applications, and there are a whole host of applications that just can't be done in the browser without JS. Luddites who complain about "but I got JS disabled" aren't the target market for an image-editor-in-the-browser. Failing to load JS at that point is just plain failure to load the application and no amount of Progresso Soup is going to help you.<p>So yeah, I much prefer all or nothing.
Firstly and this may suprise you you... We know you exist. Yes you with a tinfoil hat, you under a repressive corporate regime. You keep trying to make your presence known through ranty blog posts, angry comments thinking we dont know you exist. We know but we found that not only are you a minority but our lives as designers and developers are a million times easier if we just ignore you. Yes i know you want to surf with vim or IE6 but thats your choice. You make your bed now lie in it but dont drag the rest of us with you!
I didn't get the point this website is trying to make. All distributed apps are like that at time of delivering the code. If that's so wrong with Javascript, what's the proposed alternative (that has a chance of being available everywhere)?
The thin-client revolution is finally here, and what an awful pile of shit it is. Whatever happened to software that just works?<p>Answer: Microsoft. Their legal team started the browser-as-OS delusion with their 1990s freakout about Netscape; this was an anti-consumer, anti-competitive lock-in strategy which now masquerades as a fundamental principle of Good Clean Living for people who give speeches about their startup's Beautiful, Human Responsive Javascript Libraries or their genius-revealing reimplementations of Emacs that can only edit one language (namely Javascript.)<p>Hence today instead of having a computer, we have DMCA-hardened thin clients, and with each click we download what amounts to a freshly-coded never-debugged malware-infected EULA-wrapped software update; and when you enter a subway tunnel the whole universe stops working.<p>Yet on the linked essay he likens turning off Javascript to removing the steering wheel from your car, which I find to be both idiotic and revealing: Your steering wheel doesn't stop working when your car goes into a tunnel. But you can see why a Googler thinks like this: Google makes a car with no steering wheel, which really might stop working properly when it loses signal in a tunnel. The real benefit of Thin Client is to the employment prospects of Javascript programmers, to the Google whose Android and browser and Javascript VM you will need to do anything useful or performant on Googlephones, and to the war criminals in technology, finance, and intelligence who carry out the destruction of human culture via airdrop of free surveillance-gathering Javascript phones, where Responsive Javascript libraries conspire with distant servers to jack up the valuations of this or that group of ten HN-darling companies, and hire three or four guys to make sure the top comment always defends Apple's weekly anti-competitive "this is what's best for consumers" move, or reminds users that There Is No Way To Prove This Isn't Another Tech Bubble.<p>The whole concept of browser-as-OS has turned out to serve the permanent security state and other old-money beneficiaries of the Bronze Age kulturkampf. Thanks to the thin-client revolution and DMCA, secure software that actually WORKS is mostly illegal.
Lazy, that is what I call it... In the past the rule was degrade gracefully if something keeps the JS from running. Now days its like "screw you, we can't be bothered to make it mostly work with css, so your out of luck if the JS didn't run".<p>For me, I run with noscript. Most of the places I frequent (here for example!) work great without any JS, other places less so, but I can selectively enable what needs to run, and many times when I find those sites that simply don't work without javascript, I just click back, and ignore them. I don't trust sites that can't at least load some basic content to convince me they aren't just a malware vector.
Ten edge cases still makes for an edge case. It's a good to think about what we're doing but for all practical reasons, yes "Everyone has JavaScript, that's right!"
Disappointing that the site links to a bunch of sources, except when it drops the knowledge bomb of "many" corporate firewalls blocking javascript.
While the point may be true, it's like don't drive a car because people do die in car accidents.
The post is misleading as most of the cards present rare edge cases where JS doesn't work. Show percentages as well.<p>Yes JS may not work 0.1% of the time. So let's fix it once all the higher priority issues are fixed.
If CDN's based in the US need to do maintenance, they will probably do it late at night <i>in the US</i>, which might be at peak time for you if your website is based outside of the US.<p>Just a though.