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Comment by timothya | Hacker News Reader

Why does that make you angry? Sometimes, reimplementing how loading works can make your website more performant, for example. If JavaScript gives developers the power to make their websites better, why shouldn't they take advantage of that power?

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It makes me angry because it's unnecessary, adds complexity, and requires me to allow whatever website to execute code on my computer. I don't want that code, I just want to read the page.

It makes me angry because it is a gross abuse of the web platform. The web is not for applications, it's for documents. I would be just as angry if I received a Word document that contained scripts that it needed to run to display the document (actually I would be angry if I received any Word document).

I don't want 7 tracking scripts, 4 advertisement scripts, jQuery, Angular.js, and whatever other junk modern webdevelopers include on their "websites". I just want the content, and that's what HTML is for. You don't need to include any JavaScript programs to show me formatted text, which is what I visited the page for. I didn't visit to see fancy scrolling effects, to have my every interaction with the document tracked, or to see nothing at all if I don't run foreign programs. I just want the content. Just give me a [motherfucking website](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/).

  It makes me angry because it is a gross abuse of the 
  web platform. The web is not for applications, it's for
  documents. I would be just as angry if I received a Word 
  document that contained scripts that it needed to run to 
  display the document (actually I would be angry if I 
  received any Word document).

That ship has already sailed, Pam. There are two webs now: the document-centric, platform-agnostic, user-controlled presentation of content as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, and the over-specified development platform that is HTML5, that ultimately originated in Win98's Active Desktop "push technology".

The latter has gained world-wide adoption because developers and industries couldn't agree to build a standard software repository that was distributed and allowed independent re-implementations of the running engine. Java tried to be that standard, but didn't have a convenient way to deliver software to end users. App stores later are becoming a close second, but being walled gardens they'll never replace that role in full.

It's still useful to think of "the two webs" as different purposes for the HTML5 technology; it's a good question in particular to ask yourself before you start a new website and decide what of the two models you want to support. Requesting that all webs are coded assuming the "web of documents" view is not realistic anymore, though.

I might agree with your for the minority of things that are literally documents. But that's not what most of the pages I visit are. Twitter is a stream of little posts and real-time notifications. My webmail client isn't a document, it's a browser for documents. Lots of sites let me add my own content, and it's a painful kludge to re-render the static HTML for every page every time anyone makes a change. Let that data get pulled out of a database and sent to the application running in my browser. That's a much better fit for what's actually happening with the content.

I have nothing against applications. I just don't want applications inside my document browsing application.

Some uses of client-side scripting on the web are useful and necessary. When that is the case, make a real application instead of abusing a platform for publishing documents. Web app developers are just making things worse for everyone.

When client-side scripting is not necessary, web developers use it anyway for some reason. Blogger is a great example of this: a blog post is definitely a document, it doesn't need any client-side scripting, yet Blogger blogs just show an empty page if you visit them with JS disabled. Why would they do that?! It's almost as if they want Blogger to be as inaccessible as possible.

>My webmail client isn't a document, it's a browser for documents.

That's exactly why it shouldn't be on the web! Abusing the web to make it into an application platform is like forcing a square into a circle-shaped hole. The web doesn't have to be everything to everyone, just let it be a platform for documents.

Not every page has to be a web app - the Blogger thing annoys me too. But if it's an app you're making, the web browser is the biggest deployed platform and therefore an appealing target. http://xkcd.com/1367/

> Twitter is a stream of little posts and real-time notifications.

The stream part is easy enough, with pagination. I have no objection to hiding the pages with JavaScript, making any page 'bottomless.' Real-time notification, obviously, can't work without some sort of execution, but one could simply show notifications on the next page viewed (or calculate them when sending that page, or whatever).

> My webmail client isn't a document, it's a browser for documents.

Good thing that you're using a browser…

I'm not opposed to using JavaScript to speed things up or enhance them, but using it to deliberately break the Web is just wrong.

If they haven't benchmarked their site on my computer, they don't know whether it's making their websites more performant. But years of experience with JS disabled by default (and only enabled when necessary) makes it very clear to me that using JS, at least on my system, is almost never a way to make any site more performant. On the contrary, it increases load times, cpu usage, and memory usage. It might also force me to use bloated crappy browsers like Firefox or Chrome where I could otherwise use something like w3m or links, which will display the page in a fraction of the RAM, much faster.

I wouldn't be disabling JS if it weren't such a pain in the ass. Or maybe I still would, just for security.

Plenty of sites do use client-side instrumentation, and so they do indeed benchmark their site on your machine, and then make decisions based on the results of those benchmarks (likely aggregated with many other benchmarks from many other users). Yes, sometimes JavaScript is used poorly in ways that make sites bloated and slow, but plenty of sites use it properly in ways that only make their sites better (collecting the appropriate data to confirm that what they are doing is making their site better).

People talk about these sites every once in a while. But my experience is that enabling JS makes things worse across the board. If there's some site that would perform better with it, these are very much in the minority. And in my experience, "old web" sites with out JS loaders and such are almost always much faster & easier on the resources.

Even if some sites deploy instrumentation, it doesn't mean they're necessarily lifting a finger to make it faster for me.

I do not find adding another vector for problems, including malicious ones in the face of persistently broken sandboxes, to be "better".

If it's a "page" I am going to "read", I don't feel the need to enable arbitrary execution of whatever gets stuffed down the pipe, beyond rendering the more restrictively defined HTML and some hopefully well-debugged -- although even with them problems continue to crop up -- image formats.

It's like a biological viral infection. Hygiene can keep it out, but once it's inside, you may have a very persistent and possibly quite debilitating problem.

I don't want to be disconnected from the world. Neither, however, do I want to engage in, um... "unprotected casual browsing".

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