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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

When I drive my car without an engine, it only goes downhill. I almost stopped using cars because I thought there was nothing interesting there.

It's 2017. Turn on your JavaScript.

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It doesn't matter what year it is, JavaScript provides zero utility on a blog except to give the author analytics.

Why do people hate the idea of documents so much? Imagine if you had to suffer through a different app for every single book you read; that is what a js-mandatory page is.

I agree. Rendering static contents shouldn't rely on JavaScript.

And I still think disabling JS is like shooting yourself in the foot on purpose.

Two wrongs don't make a right. Also I'm tired of people who always have to point out "hurrr durr site don't work without JS". Nobody cares.

'Also I'm tired of people who always have to point out "hurrr durr site don't work without JS". Nobody cares'

Apparently enough nobodies to tire you out.

MathJax

It looks like in this case it's not so much a blog post as "I had this thread of discoveries on Twitter, how about I try out Storify to just bung it on my blog"[0], which means using Twitter's JavaScript embedding. Obviously even from a narrative perspective a properly-written blog post would be to prefer but this STILL manages to be way better than linking to the twitter.com feed because Twitter's JS UI is completely unusable to read threads...

[0] https://twitter.com/fogus/status/888076512443998209

As far as I am aware hacking the browser via malicious Javascript is still a thing. I don't mind selectively enabling it for a particular website, but I absolutely hate how every site I go to serves up Javascript from 10 different URLs. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/pwn2own-2017-microsoft-edge...

The point of the post was supposed to be: Gee-- it's interesting that the site doesn't look visibly "broken" when viewed w/o Javascript, and that might cause people to just skip it.

It doesn't bother me to turn on Javascript when a site needs it. (If I complained about every site posted to HN that needlessly required Javascript I'd never get anything done...)

I'll turn it on by default as soon as websites stop abusing my CPU, battery, and bandwidth with their gluttonous scripts. On my machine, with sites I visit, the browsing experience is perceptibly better (and the machine stays much cooler on my lap) w/ Javascript selectively enabled.

I know 10 years ago turning off Javascript was still a real concern. I tend to be of the mindset that in 2017 a browser without Javascript is like a browser without a mouse/trackpad - technically viable, but no one does it, so depending on Javascript is a given. Know of any good statistics on this however?

1.1% of people have it turned off in one measurement: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missi....

A slightly more recent UK figure has it at less than 0.1%

https://blog.yell.com/2016/04/just-many-web-users-disable-co...

I like to avoid Javascript where possible just to build a nice clean fast page.

Oh, well, let's all drop everything and accommodate that 1.1%!

And 70% of that 1.1% probably browses HN. Perspective is weird.

I wonder what percentage of that is actually poorly written scrapers/spiders.

... most.

I am part of the 1.1% mentioned somewhere in this thread. If some page really and truly looks worth it, I do a click or two in uMatrix and enable the damn thing - for the originating domain, and then for external sources if it still doesn't work and really, really, really looks worth it. If it's clear that I shall be coming back, I make the exceptions permanent. But boy do I keep a mental note that the page is sub-standard. Approach worked well in 1996 (though no uMatrix), and works well in 2017.

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