It's 2018 and you're criticizing a site for not running well with JS disabled. You're the one actively deciding to make websites harder to use, why should they design the site for you?
JS can be used to enhance the experience, and even build things otherwise impossible in the browser, and it's totally justified. But taking the newest, shinest web application framework and turning what's a tree of regular web documents into a web application, with data unaccessible if you don't run the entirety of its JS? That's just wrong.
At the risk of snark I don't have a clear way around, your definition of "good engineering" appears to be the same one that thinks a modern toilet is no better than a hole in the ground. Nobody that pays for developer time in 2018 is going to optimize their site for people that go out of their way to willfully turn off part of the stack. It's not gonna happen. Effort for no reward.
The protocol you describe, just a bare tree of text links, already exists as Gopher. People mostly stopped using that.
I turn off a part of the stack (or rather, run it on a whitelist), because people are using wrong parts of the stack for wrong things.
If you use the right parts of the stack for the right things, the result is a lean, accessible and interoperable piece of software. That's what the Internet was designed for. Alas, few people care, and in particular, interoperability is actively being opposed.
RE the toilet example, current webdev is more like refusing to build toilets in apartments and instead building them into car seats, because it's 2018, everyone has a car and a driver's license (or, rather, everyone in the population we want to monetize).
> more like refusing to build toilets in apartments and instead building them into car seats, because it's 2018, everyone has a car and a driver's license
Or maybe even making all kinds of interactive, surprising and unhygienic features on the toilet?
Some things should be simple and just work. They should work in a predictable manner and in a way that minimises risk for the users.
> Nobody that pays for developer time in 2018 is going to optimize their site for people that go out of their way to willfully turn off part of the stack. It's not gonna happen.
FWIW it takes less developer time to make a decent website without Javascript.
Javascript also introduces risks that are non existent in static pages.
Now if theese JS sites were super snappy and worked well offline etc I'd say probably wort it.
But I guess they are often worse that a plain old web page.
- someone who has created static and dynamic webpages since late last millenium
I disagree, most of them are simple static sites. Gmail, Google Docs, etc. are the outliers, not the norm. Reddit is a static text site with images. Hacker News is a static text site. Blogs are static text sites (with a few embedded images or non-text objects.
It doesn't take a lot of genius, time, or money to set a link w/ url parameters or use a standard html form for e.g. upvoting or comment submission, and then override that with javascript for fancier UI / AJAX / avoid redirects, etc -- i.e., extra polish, rather than it being the only option and the site just becomes nonfunctional instead of degrading gracefully.
This benefits more than just one tiny group of users: it might also aid disabled users and accessibility software (not to mention the developers of that software), security nuts, people who turn js off to improve performance on low-spec machines (it's 2018 here, but more than a few countries have a four (or even three!) figure GDP/capita, so their machines aren't going to be 2018 machines. This is just off the top of my head, how many other groups might there be that would benefit?
You're thinking as a developer and not as a business. A website that works perfectly well for 99% of visitors and adds the pizazz to keep them on the site is the goal.
Will it help the businesses if they learned that plain web sites are easier to create (and update), are better for the users and needs less maintenance?
It's 2018 and web developers are still not competent enough to build simple websites (blogs, news, reddit) without forcing visitors to use JS.
JS is the technology responsible for most of the malware infections and spyware ad-tracking. It's not like people disable it just to piss off developers, there are very good reasons to turn it off.
>JS is the technology responsible for most of the malware infections and spyware ad-tracking. It's not like people disable it just to piss off developers, there are very good reasons to turn it off.
While I agree that JS is part of the malvertising problem but this statement is blowing things to an exaggeration. Chrome, Firefox and Safari are equally responsible for the infection that occurs because of JS.
I keep asking for it and never had any good response. The best I have found is that it helps show phishing. A link that said "Install me" and trigger the download of an executable when you click on it doesn't make HTML responsible for malware infections.
"JS disabled" is just the consequent, tech-y angle to not requiring JS to display every damn text box. I get JS to load things like simple menu-pop-ups or expanding an image, but it's so infused in the new reddit layout, you need it to basically display simple, static text content. It's just bloat.
