Comment by sedev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sedev | Hacker News Reader

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That reply makes you sound like you don't know how NoScript, web standards, and good UIs work.

I have access to the Good Stuff that JS enables - and there's lots of Good Stuff! But with NoScript on, I (a) get to see who's following web standards and who isn't, (b) get pages that load faster, (c) get a more secure browsing experience, and (d) by default am spared the UI/UX idiocy that some sites try to perpetrate (especially in the area of intrusive advertising).

Using NoScript and ad-blocking is pretty much like using Instapaper or the new Reader feature of Safari - it is an assertion of the user's rights. It says "no no no, fuck all your irrelevant stuff: give me CONTENT." Not advertising, not fluff, not background images, not boilerplate: CONTENT. I like how Nathan Bowers put it: "If it looks better in Instapaper than in the browser, back to the drawing board."[1] If you purposefully make it harder for visitors to your web site to get the content they care about, you're a bad programmer and a bad person. Bad JS is one of the most frequent manifestations of making it harder to get to the content - and so in my browser, JS is a privilege, not a right.

Speaking of privilege: I am privileged - I'm about 100% able-bodied. If you say 'fuck off' to and ignore users who are not - who are for example not sighted, can't use a mouse, or can't distinguish certain colors - then you're also a bad person, in a different way.

[1]: http://uxhero.com/blog/i-redesigned-avc-com/

I downvoted you, and I'd like to explain why:

Please, tone down the rhetoric and try to be more civil.

Your comment was helpful, it taught me things I don't know, it's a great comment. Except, you chose to call others "bad people", not once but twice, for doing something you don't agree with.

I can take you not liking sites that have ads. I can even take you saying that people who make such sites are bad programmers (though I disagree).

But seriously, putting "stuff in the way of content you care about" makes someone a bad person? Even if I halfway agreed with this, you're talking about someone else's site and someone else's content, that they chose to generously share with you. What makes you entitled to not only read that content, but to call them a bad person for putting in ads?

Thank you for the explanation. That was entirely reasonable.

I admit that I haven't disabled Javascript in a long time (and haven't used NoScript), so things might be better now. My impression was that it fails silently where JS is required, but this may not be true. Also, I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who writes web apps. I'm not talking about uses like the shitty window dressing the parent was talking about.

But no, it's not bad web development practice to ignore the tiny percentage of people who don't have javascript enabled, at least when writing a web app - in fact, ignoring that segment of the population frees you to do wonderful things! Things that aren't possible with straight HTML.

Trying to make things work well for those without JS enabled is like Microsoft's trying to make their new OS software compatible all the way back to DOS, and having to make all sorts of unfortunate design decisions as a result. I would much rather make my website awesome for 95% of potential users and leverage the full power of JS than make it mediocre and usable by 100%. It's a choice, and one that I happily make.

I think more and more web developers will be making that choice in the coming years (not the ones with content sites, maybe, but who knows). That's what I meant when I said they'd start ignoring you.

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