Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwGuardian | Hacker News Reader

Popular doesn't necessarily imply correct. Modern Single Page Applications rely on JS for everything. Unless HN prefers static documents, simply insisting on an anachronistic expectation of functionality without JS, however righteous, isn't fruitful.

View on HN

And time and time again, those "Modern" single page applications are utilizing javascript to provide a LOWER quality of product than the previous version. Atlassian spent the last year or so SPAing all of their apps, and every single update is less usable, slower, less discoverable, and uglier than the previous. I would literally be more productive by simply using a 5 year old version of their sites, and changing nothing else.

> Unless HN prefers static documents

Have you looked at HN lately, or read any of the submissions? Shit, we'd go back to using Gopher if possible.

Static sites with a sprinkle of optional JS to enhance usage (votes in HNs case, although inline JS replies would be a good idea as well) is the way to go for most sites.

SPAs are meant for _large applications_, where the majority of functionality derives from JS, and would be cumbersome to manage otherwise. There are very few of these in comparison.

Gopher protocol would be preferred!

We enable JavaScript selectively, and it would need to be the same for WASM. Enabling for everything just to support the rare pages I find it useful is nuts.

Have you considered the inverse, to allow by default, and disallow flagged domains?

There isn't much point to the inverse. You load pages, including all the stuff you don't want, then disallow it. Closing the barn door after the horse has bolted so to speak. You also have to remember to check every site you visit, which nobody is going to do consistently. With disallow by default, it is obvious you need to look because the site isn't working. While I was required to do this for work, I found myself doing it on my personal systems too, because things are in general more pleasant. A surprising amount of sites work just fine for the purposes of browsing, and many more just requiring one or two domains added to the whitelist. Often leaving out large amounts of crap from several ad servers and metrics collectors and video streaming I usually don't want to bother with and popup banners telling me to disable my adblocker and font tweaks because I'm obviously incapable of configuring my browser to be most usable to me and 'tagmanagers' which apparently do absolutely nothing and widget for forms I'm not interested in filling out. I've more than once found enabling JavaScript makes problematic pages worse.

HTML 5 + CSS 3 already provides quite a rich experience, in what visuals are concerned.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com