Comment by Aurornis
7 hours ago
> I block JS
The percentage of visitors who block JS is extremely small. Many of those visits are actually bots and scrapers that don’t interpret JS. Of the real users who block JS, most of them will enable JS for any website they actually want to visit if it’s necessary.
What I’m trying to say is that making any product decision for the extremely small (but vocal) minority of users who block JS is not a good product choice. I’m sorry it doesn’t work for your use case, but having the entire browser ecosystem cater to JS-blocking legitimate users wouldn’t make any sense.
I block JS, too. And so does about 1-2% of all Web users. JavaScript should NOT be REQUIRED to view a website. It makes web browsing more insecure and less private, makes page load times slower, and wastes energy.
> And so does about 1-2% of all Web users.
To put that in context, about 6 percent of US homes have no internet access at all. The “I turn off JS” crowd is at least 3x smaller than the crowd with no access at all.
The JS ship sailed years ago. You can turn it off but a bunch of things simply will not work and no amount of insisting that it would not be required will change that.
I'm hearing you say, "don't waste your breath because change is not possible." And there you have your self-fulfilling prophecy.
To quote someone who lived before me: don't accept the things you cannot change. Change the things you cannot accept.
And the no-JS ship has not sailed. Government websites require accessibility, and at least in the UK, do not rely on JS.
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I don't see how this makes the "JS availability should be the baseline" assumption any more legitimate. We make it possible to function in a society for those 6% of people. Low percentage still works out to a whole lot of people who shouldn't be left out.
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Without saying whether I think that's a good or bad thing, as a practical matter, I 100% agree. Approximately no major websites spend any effort whatsoever supporting non-JS browsers today. They probably put that in the class of text only browsers, or people who override all CSS: "sure, visitors can do that, but if they've altered their browser's behavior then what happens afterward is on them."
And frankly, from an economic POV, I can't blame them. Imagine a company who write a React-based website. (And again, I'm not weighing in on the goodness or badness of that.) Depending on how they implemented it, supporting a non-JS version may literally require a second, parallel version of the site. And for what, to cater to 1-2% of users? "Hey boss, can we triple our budget to serve two versions of the site, kept in lockstep and feature identical so that visitors don't scream at us, to pick up an extra 1% or 2% of users, who by definition are very finicky?" Yeah, that's not happening.
I've launched dozens of websites over the years, all of them using SSR (or HTML templates as we called them back in the day). I've personally never written a JavaScript-native website. I'm not saying the above because I built a career on writing JS or something. And despite that, I completely understand why devs might refuse to support non-JS browsers. It's a lot of extra work, it means they can't use the "modern" (React launched in 2013) tools they're use to, and all without any compelling financial benefit.
In addition to those things, JavaScripts can also cause some things to not work properly even though they would work without JavaScripts.
I make Javascript mandatory to use my sites regardless of if it's necessary.
The point of the poster you're responding to is that sites are built JS-first for 98-99% of users, and it takes extra work to make them compatible with "JavaScript should NOT be REQUIRED to view a website", and no one is going to bother doing that work for 1-2% of users.
Yeah... or...... maybe they should just build websites the proper way the first time around, returning plain HTML, perhaps with some JS extras. Any user-entered input needs to be validated again on the backend anyway, so client-side JS is often a waste.
Of note here is that the segment we're talking about is actually an intersection of two very small cohorts; the first, as you note, are people who don't own a television errr disable Javascript, and the second is sites that actually rely on XSLT, of which there are vanishingly few.