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Comment by CyberDroiD | Hacker News Reader

The bizarre rationalization of "a necessity to separate content and design" is false, but I understand if it helps graphic designers.

However it is bizarre. Rich-Text-Fields are what the customers want, and that combines text, audio and video and all text formatting.

Just make sure your website works without Javascript or CSS enabled.

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The bizarre rationalization of "make sure your website works without Javascript or CSS enabled" is false, but I understand if it helps programmers.

However it is bizarre. Functional sites are what the customer wants, and that combines HTML, Javascript and CSS. which every browser worth mentioning is capable of rendering.

(if you can't think of why anyone would care about separating content and design, think of a site that needs to work in both mobile and desktop browsers. How can you achieve that without separating design?)

> (if you can't think of why anyone would care about separating content and design, think of a site that needs to work in both mobile and desktop browsers. How can you achieve that without separating design?)

Well, you could serve the normal page (with the normal stylesheets) to mobile browsers and not disable zoom. This would make your web site one of the better mobile web sites.

I do not understand why people say this. The zoomed experience is often absolutely terrible.

As an aside, I happened to notice in a recent nightly build of Firefox 23 that they took away the "Enable JavaScript" check box on the options/preferences applet in the Windows build.

If they relegate that setting to about:config that's probably going to alter the broader user perception about what JavaScript actually represents. It kind of pisses me off. I'll probably stop using Firefox because of it.

I'll trade all the global "click here to live in 1998" checkboxes for an Esc button that freezes a site into something indistinguishable from a scrollable screenshot.

That's a superficial (perhaps naive) view of what JavaScript is capable of in a browser like Firefox.

I'm not interested in having heatmaps, timers and other metrics recorded simply because I want to read the news.

Not to mention that I also like to save pages for offline reading, and I expect them to re-render normally, and not trigger background GETS and POSTS and then fail to load.

I'd also like the <a href> tag to behave as I expect it should, and not be intercepted, and changed after I click on it, but before the desired page loads.

Oh, right, and I'd also like my history stack to stay relatively private, but you know that's really asking a lot isn't it: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/Manipulating_th...

Meh, whatever. I guess we should just accept the prevailing wind, and learn to cope with its ramifications, no? Is all this so inevitable?

Disabling Javascript outright is the nuclear option. Most who really care about managing Javascript are using NoScript, an extension. Those who don't care, or don't have the technical expertise to understand Javascript won't really care where the option to turn off Javascript is located, because it already doesn't matter to them.

I disagree. It's really easy to turn on and off. And requires all the technical expertise of tying your shoelaces.

Tools/Edit > Options/Preferences > Content > click "Enable JavaScript" > OK

Disable it for 30 seconds, while you're using any particular page, and then switch it right back on. No whitelists or blacklists to comb through. Just refresh the page and it takes effect.

Downloading an add-on or an extension is annoying and creates hassle with every upgrade. It's not automatically readily available on every computer you use. In controlled environments with shared machines, desktop support techs don't install add-ons by default, and might actively prevent you from installing them.

Adjusting a global setting that's within easy reach is not an extreme response.

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