Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

There are dinosaurs like me who use the web mostly for reading stuff on websites. I also happen to use an old, quite slow computer as my default machine.

It aggrevates me when a site that I try to open because of its textual content takes 30 seconds to render since there's too much Javascript going on. Then I'm typically sitting there thinking: "how hard can it be to display a piece of text?" Because of this, when I see my CPU spike as I try to open a website in a new tab, I very often decide to simply close the tab again and do without the information I originally came there to see. This happens a lot for me with online magazines, such as wired or techcrunch. One trick is to invoke the "Readability" bookmarklet if I can get to it fast enough, i.e., before the JavaScript has frozen my browser completely.

Of course I understand that I am part of a tiny minority. And probably I'm not part of your target group anyway. And the web is so much more in 2013 than pages with text on them.

If you do, however, want someone like me to come to your site, you better remember to keep it dinosaur-friendly.

You're in a demographic that clearly chooses not to spend money or doesn't have any money to spend, which is not attractive to people trying to make money on the internet. I'm guessing government sites would be the only sites that are interested in serving you.

Just because I don't want to spend money on a new phone or a new computer doesn't mean that I don't want to spend money on a new car.

In all honesty, why should I care about you, the tiny minority? Why should I waste any time at all worrying about you?

Nobody's saying you should. But designing things in a progressive-enhancement-type way will mean that you have no need to worry about all these "minorities" as most things will generally more or less work.

Besides we're all minorities in one way or another. I'm sure I could find some dimension by which you're a minority and you'd be pretty cheesed off if you weren't catered for for some trivial reason.

Not everything in this world has to cater to me. I'd prefer it if everyone stopped trying to be all things.

You'd be fine if half the web didn't work for you?

How about we say it's fine replacing text with images? We could always use alt tags for accessibility. The number of people who ever actually select/copy text from your website will be <1%, so why not just do away with it and get the text in any font we like, with any rendering style & layout we like?

Because that is an utterly ridiculous strawman. Using images for text is firstly almost entirely pointless, and has many many drawbacks that using JavaScript doesn't. For instance, it's a pain in the arse to maintain, it breaks text reflowing, it's huge, you have to deal with image compression, and it likely ruins the ability of search engines to spider your content without OCR.

Not to mention that any decent screen reader should surely be decent enough to extract text from an already rendered page (I mean christ, we have testing frameworks that can basically do this already).

If building apps using purely JavaScript breaks screen-readers, we need to fix screen readers. If our applications aren't working for people who insist on browsing with lynx or whatever, well, for shame.

Honestly though, another factor of "JavaScript only" things is that it means that some sort API is exposed to the client, so if it's really such a massive problem, just pull the JSON and parse that into something readable.

I would argue it's fairly similar to using javascript to load documents. If you have a web-app, I'm a huge fan of javascript/client-side rendering. If you've got a blog, not so much.

Well of course, tools for the job.

Not as ridiculous as you think - a large amount of content is locked into PDFs which present effectively as images, and HTML wasn't always as dominant as it is today.

The idea that it is actively shameful to use Lynx is strange and antithetical to the way the web was originally designed - the user agent is SUPPOSED to be in control of presentation, the markup is SUPPOSED to be semantic.

It's not that it's shameful to use Lynx. I love Lynx. However, the web is continuously evolving, and things like Lynx are not keeping up - I mean, does it support WebGL and HTML5 video?

I absolutely think there's a place for a text-based browser still, however, one that is designed with modern considerations.

"Because that is an utterly ridiculous strawman."

Of course it is, but it's clearly an admitted strawman.

What's wrong with people these days? You can't rhetorically explore someone's views without everyone jumping in and shouting "strawman" as if it's their new favourite word.

> What's wrong with people these days? You can't rhetorically explore someone's views without everyone jumping in and shouting "strawman" as if it's their new favourite word.

A strawman -- which, as you admit, this was -- is very different from "rhetorically exploring someone's views". Its "rhetorically exploring something distinct from the views of your opponent, and using it to impugn the views of your opponent."

Which, you know, makes people upset.

>A strawman -- which, as you admit, this was -- is very different from "rhetorically exploring someone's views"

No, it isn't. You are making the mistake of conflating a strawman with an argument built on a strawman as a logical fallacy.

> > A strawman [...] is very different from "rhetorically exploring someone's views"

> No, it isn't.

Yes, it is.

> You are making the mistake of conflating a strawman with an argument built on a strawman as a logical fallacy.

No, I'm not. If you are exploring their views rather than yourself constructing something new and distinct from their views, you aren't making a strawman, whether or not you also, implicitly or explicitly, are arguing against their position using whatever you are exploring, which would be the strawman fallacy in the case where you were constructing a strawman.

A strawman can be used to explore their views. That is the point. It is only a fallacy if you create a strawman, then argue against it and claim to have argued against the original point. That has nothing to do with anything that occurred in your conversation.

> A strawman can be used to explore their views.

No, it really can't. Using something meaningfully distinct to "explore" their views is the exact same logical fallacy as using something meaningfully distinct to "argue against" their views. What you are dealing with is something distinctly different than their views, whether you are "arguing against" it or merely "exploring" it.

And, even if it could, it still wouldn't be equivalent to exploring their views, so being called out for using a strawman when using a strawman -- for whatever purpose -- woudl still not be being called out for using a strawman whenever you rhetorically explore someone's views.

There are two different kinds of minority to consider:

1. People who are part of a minority by choice. For instance, they choose to use an old computer, old OS, old web browser, etc. even though it is within their means to upgrade. Or they have current software but intentionally restrict it with add-ons like NoScript. You might be justified in not catering to these minorities, because it's just not profitable and you have no moral obligation to do so. Maybe the GP falls in that category; I don't know.

2. People who are in a minority through no choice of their own, and have no power to change their circumstance. One example would be a poor student or job-seeker who's stuck with an old computer and can't do anything about it. People with disabilities also fall in this latter category. I know someone who once lost a job because he is blind and some inaccessible software barred him from doing that job. He described how that felt in this blog post:

http://blindaccessjournal.com/2006/02/torn-from-the-collecti...

All that to say that your comment is quite insensitive. Those are real people in that small minority, and depending on why they're in that minority, we developers might have an obligation to accommodate them.

EDIT: Yes, I know that JavaScript apps can be accessible.

I should've phrased it better, but I was asking him as a person of minority by choice.

I fully understand making a site accessible for those who need it, but I don't understand the NoScript people.

What is there to understand about NoScript people? They just dislike malware, having their accounts stolen and having their personal data up for sale.

Also, if you don't have an unlimited Internet plan, not having to download 5MB of trackers, "analytics" scripts and Flash ads can be a pretty significant advantage.

Social justice is not a factor for most people when designing a frontend architecture. My heart goes out to those running IE6 on Windows Me, but I'm not going to let the minority oppress the majority for my app I'm building.

Well, everybody is in some kind of minority... But that's not the point.

Are you sure about your numbers? How do you know that people with javascript disabled are a minority? Or, more specifically, how do you measure that without requiring javascript?

I'm all for making web applications that need javascript. But let's do it for the right reasons, not because "everybody has javascript installed".

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