Comment by dpark
14 hours ago
Then you misheard me.
I’m not saying change is not possible. I’m saying the change you propose is misguided. I do not believe the entire world should abandon JS to accommodate your unusual preferences nor should everyone be obliged to build two versions of their site, one for the masses and one for those with JS turned off.
Yes, JS is overused. But JS also brings significant real value to the web. JS is what has allowed websites to replace desktop apps in many cases.
> Yes, JS is overused. But JS also brings significant real value to the web. JS is what has allowed websites to replace desktop apps in many cases.
Exactly. JS should be used to make apps. A blog is not an app. Your average blog should have 0 lines of JS. Every time I see a blog or a news article who's content doesn't load because I have JS disabled I strongly reconsider whether it's worth my time to read or not.
Did I say abandon? No. I said it should not be required. JavaScript should be supplementary to a page, but not necessary to view it. This was its original intent.
> JS is what has allowed websites to replace desktop apps in many cases.
Horribly at that, with poorer accessibility features, worse latency, abused visual style that doesn't match the host operating system, unusable during times of net outages, etc, etc.
> JavaScript should be supplementary to a page, but not necessary to view it.
I’m curious. Do Google Maps, YouTube, etc even work with JS off?
> This was its original intent.
Original intent is borderline irrelevant. What matters is how it is actually used and what value it brings.
> Horribly at that
I disagree. You say you turn JS off for security but JS has made billions of people more secure by creating a sandbox for these random apps to run in. I can load up a random web app and have high confidence that it can’t muck with my computer. I can’t do the same with random desktop apps.
> You say you turn JS off for security but JS has made billions of people more secure by creating a sandbox for these random apps to run in.
is "every website now expects to run arbitrary code on the client's computer" really a more secure state of affairs? after high profile hardware vulnerabilities exploitable even from within sandboxed js?
from how many unique distributors did the average person run random untrusted apps that required sandboxing before and after this became the normal way to deliver a purely informational website and also basically everything started happening online?
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> I’m curious. Do Google Maps, YouTube, etc even work with JS off?
I use KDE Marble (OpenStreetMap) and Invidious. They work fine.
> Original intent is borderline irrelevant. What matters is how it is actually used and what value it brings.
And that's why webshit is webshit.
> I can’t do the same with random desktop apps.
I can, and besides the point, why should anyone run random desktop apps? (Rhetorical question, they shouldn't.) I don't run code that I don't trust. And I don't trust code that I can't run for any purpose, read, study, edit, or share. I enforce this by running a totally-free (libre) operating system, booted with a totally-free BIOS, and installing and using totally-free software.
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