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Comment by wackget | Hacker News Reader

Is that... a loading screen for a text-based news website? Christ.

Funny how a text based website doesn't work without JS.

It's amazing how many sites won't even load nor give you a warning when you just opt out of JS (e.g. by using an addon like NoScript). Even very big ones, like twitch.

Twitch I can see. Very complicated interface and chat setup. But I was surprised to see a warning on stackoverflow.

On the bright side, SO warns you that it might degrade, but it does actually work fine (heck, I can browse SO in dillo without issue), which is far better than most sites, and actually pretty decent.

It's a dark pattern though. It doesn't provide any useful information, but is an ugly red hover panel in addition to other hover panels.

I don't see how you could remove JS from twitch without gutting a huge chunk of the functionality.

Do it like they did in the good old days when JS was new and couldn't be relied upon to exist.

Don't rely upon it to exist.

Serve up well marked content, CSS that might format it nicely, and JavaScript that allows some types of per-validation to happen client side but only as a means of making a page nicer. The server side should STILL perform all data validation, normalization, and verification (assume someone will craft their own form submission).

No, Twitch specifically. It's an interactive chat and live video streaming application that happens to be built out of web tech. If you don't have AJAX, you could maybe-kinda-sorta kludge it together out of forms and video elements, but it'd degrade hard, and need to be built completely different from the normally-interactive version.

I was thinking of Twitter for some reason.

Twitch could be done with a native app... the phone versions SHOULD be done with such if they aren't.

How is installing a native application a viable alternative to javascript? Presumably, if you're blocking the latter is because you don't want to run untrusted code on your device.

Twitch does have an IRC gateway, so it's possible to use your own application for chat.

As another poster commented, the video aspect can be fulfilled with a number of different methods, and I don't see any technical reason a standard couldn't be followed to allow for arbitrary clients to handle that interaction as well.

We had chat long before the era of SPAs -- no JS was required with things like long-polling, although that's one of the applications where I think a bit of JS will definitely be useful and welcome.

As for video streaming, that's not hard at all, especially now that there's a <video> tag.

On the flip side a lot of sites, in particular news sites, work better with JS disabled. They load faster, the entire content is visible, and oddly enough the majority of paywalls seem to be implemented client side and it neatly bypasses them.

Ironically, an excellent demonstration of the "opt-out illusion" as applied to JS.

It's not one of those sites where the content can be easily found in the source of the page either. The latter appears to be, at a cursory inspection, consist of tracking scripts, furthering the irony of this demonstration.

At least a site that calls itself "the TLS" is served via HTTPS...

...aaand now we're distracted by a completely irrelevant annoyance of technology instead of discussing the content of the article and some very serious issues...

It's not completely irrelevant, disabling javascript used to be a way to somewhat protect your privacy.

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