The NoJS Club
nojs.club
nojs.club
We've seen so many amazing things become possible due to JavaScript. We can communicate and collaborate better than ever before. Even news sites, historically some of the biggest abusers of JS (with ads/tracking), have used JavaScript to build amazing data visualizations and tell stories in new and unique ways.
The criteria for this "club" is so narrow, even Hacker News wouldn't even be eligible! Is that really what we should be striving for?
Sure, sometimes JS has been abused. But Chrome/Firefox/Safari have done an amazing job of reigning in abuse and speeding it up, and I'm so excited about the crazy weird new things I get to build every day because web technologies have gotten so good.
Secondly, JS abuse is now built into browsers, so yes no JS is a decent goal for privacy, security, and speed.
The very first qualifier to join is "Make sure there is no Javascript on your website," not "make sure the Javascript on your site is necessary."
There are countless websites which have no dynamic content and yet choose to require javascript to function.
The other major problem is the vulnerabilities you open yourself up to by allowing javascript to run in your browser.
99.9% of the time it's simply not worth it for me, and I wish I could say "no thank you" to all those sites that use it but don't actually need it to deliver all their static content.
Even many of the sites that deliver dynamic content via javascript could probably have been designed to work just fine without it, but no, companies just have to have their tracking and serve up all their ads via JS.
Two noteworthy examples on this are Twitter and YouTube, especially in their latest designs. 99% of their functionality could be accomplished without any JS, and thus be accessible from a very wide range of browsers, but they've turned into horribly wasteful SPAs that now require an extremely recent browser and accompanying dependent software --- and hardware --- to access. IMHO it's a huge waste of resources, and it's time this endless churn was put to a stop.
We need much more naming and shaming of this practice. Software needs to be more responsible with regards to the resources it consumes, especially if it does so without any apparent neccessity.
Because it's on the client, and diffused over all users, it's essentially free to the producer, and hence gets much, much worse.
As a good example, I remember how Facebook became much, much slower for me post React. This then spread across the web, leading to much pain for a really large amount of users, but counterbalanced by much pleasure for developers.
It's funny how that worked out.
Whether something is possible is not a reasonable standard to judge by.
Here's a list of ways people consume web content besides the web browsers most webdevs test on:
- A phone in a train entering a tunnel. HTML loaded, but nothing else.
- A computer on shared hotel Wi-Fi with a packet loss rate of 70%.
- A browser with an addon that applies a dark theme to web pages by injecting a stylesheet
- A browser with default background/foreground colors that aren't white/black
- Braille readers
- Screen readers
- E-readers and webpage-to-epub converters
- Browser reader-mode, or a host of 3rd-party reader-mode addons
- Bookmarking services with article extractors (e.g. Pocket)
- RSS readers
- Printouts
- Textual browsers: lynx, links, elinks, w3m
- An old computer in the public library, running Firefox 23
- A niche OS with a custom browser you've never heard of
- A browser that won't exist until the year 2028
- A mobile app you've never heard of
- A link aggregator that displays previews of articles
- A custom script that converts HTML to markdown and saves the markdown file for offline reading.
Each of these is an edge case. Yet most users fit into a few edge cases. I have yet to meet a single person who isn't often inconvenienced by being an edge case.
A simple site that uses HTML with some CSS properly automatically gets stellar cross-browser compatibility and accessibility. My site works well on everything from Firefox to lynx to screenreaders (I don't have a braille reader to test, but I suspect it should work well on one), and I didn't even have to try. If your train goes through a tunnel and only HTML loads, it'll still look just fine; CSS is an optional progressive enhancement.
Every piece of tech you throw at a site makes some edge case fail. If there are multiple ways to deliver the features we need, we should choose the one that's the simplest, to avoid excluding more edge cases. If your website is a blog with formatted text, there's no reason to add JS and throw out all the edge cases that this could exclude.
TLDR: Don't build a gingerbread house with construction equipment. Plenty of sites don't need to use future tech.
This might be the (tech) understatement of the year.
Most sites I visit work just fine, or better, JS blocked. Which means they are ab-/overusing it.
No, it's what this club is striving for. This club isn't advocating for 100% of websites to be a part of it. It's encouraging an idea that could use a bit of love, not demanding it.
https://github.com/umaar/offline-website-scripts/tree/master...
- Lots of Google products don't work
- Wikipedia looks the same
- GitHub works pretty well, including lots of functionality I thought was JS only
- Amazon seems to work just fine
To submit a site, you have to file an issue on GitHub. If you consider developers who use GitHub vs developers who don't/won't use GitHub... it seems that any given developer in the former set is more likely to be using JS on their homepage than those in the latter set.
Regardless of anything, given the subtleties of the way the system is designed, it's important to understand that this is not, as will be popularly interpreted, a "list of people with homepages that don't use JS", but instead "a list of people on GitHub who have homepages that don't use JS".
People started using invasive trackers not because the trackers are innate, but because someone built them.
People are starting to realise how a lot of JS use is unnecessary, and the opposition to it is growing.
These people don't represent anyone's customer base and can be pretty much ignored on the basis that they are curmudgeonly tech contrarians. They can't be sold to anyway, so who cares.
Thankfully, the Web is not exclusively a commerce platform. Not all websites are beholden to investors.
First link is literally only four lines of text. Three of those are links. Second link is dead. Third is basically the first but with emojis ... Ok, I stopped after that.
What exactly is this trying to showcase again?
I think something like CSS Garden is a much better showcase.
Shows a banner "You Don't Need JavaScript to Run This Site (turn it off here)"
It's a response to all the "You Need JavaScript to Run This Site" banners we see everywhere even on plain text/image sites.
(To be clear, I'm not asking to join the club with JS on my page, just highlighting what I think is an acceptable use of JS)
Allow me to introduce you to fire, and the wheel. ARM has a JS specific instruction.
If you want to homestead off the grid without JS I think that’s cool bro, but don’t act like you’re better for it.
Someone might find it useful, and hopefully someone from GH takes the constructive criticism.
If so, I dducked "css only slide out menu" and this was the second result: https://1stwebdesigner.com/pure-css-navigation-menus/
Eg. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31506684/expand-collapse...
> Not all websites need Javascript to be beautiful and usable. This is a showcase of the Javascript-less web.
It does not say:
> JavaScript is bad and no one should ever use it.
There were about two when I clicked through the top 15 links- most of them are small black text on a bright white page. I'm grateful that at least the majority of those restricted page width to something less than 100 characters.
And I’m finding that with all these “buck the site design trend with this unnecessary design constraint”
So far I haven't seen any staying power in production and it seems more like art subcultures that very young people dabble in for a while in niche online communities more so than a statement or something to pay attention to