Create No-JavaScript friendly sites

I absolutely agree that JS is over-used, but for anything other than very static content I generally am not interested in kowtowing to the strict &quot;no JS&quot; folks. Javascript has become a fundamental part of the web, and for the same reason I won&#x27;t put in extra work to make my sites work in IE, I also will not put in extra work to make my sites work for (a vanishingly small number of) people who pre-emptively block one of the most powerful tools in my belt.<p>On a side note, the first example the author uses for a menu alternative[0] is highly obnoxious. The &quot;unobtrusive&quot; example assumes that your page is written in PHP but doesn&#x27;t declare this assumption up front, it leaves it until half way into the article. The example is not usable in a static website that won&#x27;t properly handle a POST request. So the JS example is still vastly superior for many cases.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;css-tricks.com&#x2F;unobtrusive-page-changer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;css-tricks.com&#x2F;unobtrusive-page-changer&#x2F;</a>

Most of my web browsing experience these days involves moving the dancing monkeys out of my way so I can read the content. Nobody comes to your site to see the ads or take your survey or sign up for your email list. Nobody comes to your site hoping to have to click again and again to read the content. Nobody comes to your site hoping to have you explain to them what a cookie is for the 10,000th time and then be forced to click &quot;OK!&quot; before they can read your content. Nobody comes to your site hoping to have their browser fingerprinted so you can track them around the web and sell their personal information.<p>With very few exceptions you are using Javascript not to enhance your users&#x27; experience but to make war on them, and if that applies to you I wish you would leave technology and take up farming.

Similar to the general negative experience with many Electron apps, I hate the JavaScript based rendering experience on some sites. I get very frustrated with reddit (the new UI) and Facebook, both flashing an animation or empty rectangles for a long time and me realizing that the content isn’t going to load at all and hitting the reload button to coax it to render the best time. The experience I get on these sites and also some on (not all) React based sites (including Gatsby blogs) is jarring in ways I can’t explain well. Even the full page reload of years past doesn’t evoke such a feeling of uncertainty on whether the content will load or not.<p>Blocking JavaScript by default also makes for faster browsing on many sites. Sometimes it also bypasses all those Adblock Killer dialogs or paywall dialogs.

I love JavaScript, but no longer trust websites to use it responsibly. There are too many vectors for tracking, so I&#x27;m forced to block. I do way too many random clicks in a day to allow JS by default.<p>Half the pages I land on now say &quot;you need JS to view this site&quot;, and that&#x27;s totally their decision! I close the tab and do something else: they get to use JavaScript, I save a bunch of time and procrastinate less... win-win!

One of the biggest annoyances is sites that use stylesheets to blank out the page until Javascript removes that style. I <i>think</i> this is to stop &quot;flash of unstyled content&quot; stuff that I really don&#x27;t care about, but it&#x27;s also trivially solvable by having Javascript add the style in question in the first place.

I built a side project a couple of months ago[1] that’s a PWA-installable interactive experience, but also degrades down to styled information in the absence of JS, and back to raw HTML if CSS fails. It’s surprisingly fun to build in this way.<p>(On another note, choosing to avoid a framework and just use some vanilla JS led to an extremely fast loading site.)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.designcritiquecards.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.designcritiquecards.com&#x2F;</a>

I applaud sites that work without Javascript.<p>The sad reality is that the enormous popularity of SPA frameworks like React and Angular make this possibility a small fraction of important sites — e.g. I don’t know if any banking or investment website that works without JavaScript.<p>Maybe this is less important as app-culture supplants such sites.

I recently wrote a blog engine as a way to learn some technologies I haven&#x27;t used.<p>For static pages, I only use in-browser JavaScript to format dates to the reader&#x27;s locale. If, for some reason, the JavaScript doesn&#x27;t run, the date will just be formatted a little differently than I&#x27;d like.<p>Not too big of a deal.

I am currently rewriting one of my companies site using Hugo, and good part of the reason is to be able to get rid of JS, it keep giving us more trouble than it is worth, constantly.<p>At first I was afraid my new site would be ugly and all... But I got pleasantly surprised by how good HTML 5 is right now, I am yet to find anything I want to make that I can&#x27;t make with just HTML and CSS.

Note that this example he gives is not accessible: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codepen.io&#x2F;victorcopque&#x2F;pen&#x2F;OVxRbq" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codepen.io&#x2F;victorcopque&#x2F;pen&#x2F;OVxRbq</a><p>A keyboard user cannot access the hidden checkbox that controls showing&#x2F;hiding the menu.

I wrote about a generalized way to use React, Redux and SSR to make sites that work without JS a short while ago[0] and I’m currently employing that strategy for a side project I’m working on.<p>So far the biggest drawback is not being able to do a payment flow with Stripe Checkout without requiring JS on _my_ service, because Stripe.js is required to redirect a user to the checkout session.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23426951" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23426951</a>

Always. My blog view is exactly the same without JS, Lightbox works as simple links and the burger is functional: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rado.bg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rado.bg</a>

I agree with the author, and think this is important. But I also want to point out JS enables one to build interesting sites without a backend, by relying on data from third party APIs. Being able to quickly do &quot;mashup&quot; sites like this can be pretty great. The time it takes to build them is usually quite short, and the hosting is almost always free.<p>As an example, I am currently building this site, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mi-cov.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mi-cov.com</a>, which I can host for free since the data comes from a government API. (The site is not done yet, I&#x27;m aware of the various issues it has)

I am old. Back in 1995 web sites loaded faster with 14.4k modems than some of them load today with 200mgps connection.

Does anyone else fondly remember the time when JS was often used to reduce page size and increase loading speeds?<p>Here&#x27;s an example from memory: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20030806180507&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tweakers.net&#x2F;pricewatch&#x2F;cat&#x2F;65" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20030806180507&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tweake...</a><p>As download speeds increased, this went out of fashion, only to be replaced by (often obnoxious) JS-based UI elements.

You can use a tracker blocklist, so you don&#x27;t have to disable javascript: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;notracking&#x2F;hosts-blocklists" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;notracking&#x2F;hosts-blocklists</a>

People like interactive sites which give immediate visual feedback for actions.<p>Aside from the tracking stuff it&#x27;s a better user experience, so it&#x27;s unlikely to go away, especially if the demand for no-js is tiny.

Is there an ADA angle to sue people (especially various govt agencies and stuff like banks) for discrimination based on inaccessible websites? I&#x27;d donate a lot for a credible push for bloat-free web.

I&#x27;d run JS by default if I could trust random sites on the internet. But, you know, that&#x27;s not really a thing unless you&#x27;re really naive.

a quick way to check is to use elinks for instance

Hmmm... Nah.

I&#x27;d like to say that ship has sailed, but in this case it&#x27;s more like the last rocket launched, Krypton was destroyed, and the last partisans of NoScript are trapped in the Dark Zone, or whatever the thing with General Zod was called. Not that big of a Superman fan.

The OMG JavaScript, parade of articles is tiresome &#x2F; endless and IMO is trending towards the absurd, and it kinda irks me.<p>I could really go without ever hearing someone bemoan how they rewrote an internal react site in 10 seconds with two lines of JavaScript, or whatever old wives tale they&#x27;ve got going on. If it was that easy then maybe it also wasn&#x27;t the end times?<p>Yeah there&#x27;s a lot of pages that maybe could get away without JavaScript. But man it&#x27;s not the 90s anymore, many site owners want lots of dynamic app like behaviors, and there&#x27;s a real question there between &quot;this reader doesn&#x27;t want it&quot; and &quot;the person who is paying for the site wants some stuff&quot;.<p>Maybe someone has Homer Simpson&#x27;s web page level absurdity with JavaScript, and maybe that&#x27;s Homer&#x27;s page and that&#x27;s ok?<p>The browser now effectively runs apps, so it&#x27;s not just going to read HTML, that&#x27;s how it is, and that&#x27;s a good thing the web does so much more now. Does it do everything we want &#x2F; how we want&#x2F; no ... but I don&#x27;t buy into the idea of a end user only web where we have to bow to the lowest common denominator as far as acceptable levels of interactivity or tech usage....