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Javascript is not required to read articles on the web. It's optional. That's why "Reader" mode is so handy, just show me the article so I can read it. Someti

Javascript is not required to read articles on the web. It's optional. That's why "Reader" mode is so handy, just show me the article so I can read it. Sometimes I don't like waiting for my browser to struggle with poorly written JS. It sounds like a classic noobie mistake... "Why are users able to turn off Javascript?" "No idea." "Remove the feature!" If anyone says Javascript is not optional, they are trying to sell you something: probably web apps!

nwh 13y ago
> Javascript is not required to read articles on the web. Unfortunately, it very much is. Nearly every website on the internet is completely useless without JavaScript. I visited a large number of links from the HN front page, and many of them had broken navigation or images. You can't actually vote on HN itself either.
- Nav_Panel 13y ago
  Hacker News sans voting is nowhere near completely useless. I strongly suspect that a majority of people who read HN don't even have accounts (and thus are unable to vote). And even if the posts do contain broken links/images, a fair amount of text is often still available; I think a site's textual content is often its most important feature (unless it's a site specifically geared toward images/interactive content). The "1% Rule"[0] grew out of this idea -- the hypothesis it poses is that 89% of the users of a given internet forum are strictly lurkers. HN has a more tech-oriented population than many forums, so I bet the differences between groups are less extreme, but I also bet that the overall trend still stands. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
  - veemjeem 13y ago
    Right, but the change isn't targeting you, the hacker news reader. There's dozens of mom & pops out there who have no understanding how browsers work and when they disable javascript, they'll complain that firefox can't render pages as well as IE.
    - PavlovsCat 13y ago
      Which is two things to me: 1. not a tragedy that can never be fixed, but usually a minor inconvenience 2. one of those random opportunities to learn something, like in this case what Javascript is. Taking away options from users because they don't know well enough can be kind of a self-full-filling prophecy, too. You cater to newbies, you get more and better newbies, entitled ones. Stuff should be nice to use, of course, and shouldn't have friendly green buttons that makes it shoot knives at you etc. but it also shouldn't be less complex than it needs to be. If you have nothing left to take away you have perfection; if you still keep taking away stuff, you don't have even more perfection, you're just breaking things. I never heard anyone complain that this option is there, or that it caused any trouble.. so what is this based on? Where are the petitions to remove this option that causes so much grief? And why stop there? Imagine all the bad stuff you can do with the printer settings. Why are there options that allow people to waste ink, paper, or even maybe damage their printer? How many people threw away their printer, damaging the environment, because they thought it was broken... when all that happened was their cat walking over the keyboard and misconfiguring it? There might be actual kids choking on toxic fumes from those printers right now, nevermind the environment; and we worry about a website not working. The Firefox options dialog is still kind of messy, and would be even if half of the options were removed. Take some leads from Opera :) Just taking away things doesn't automatically help, logically ordering them while also putting them in tiers of expertise does. [By the way, all those keyboard shortcuts? They have to go, "hacker news readers" can get them back by editing an .ini setting -- the risk is just too great that someone might open the dev tools and then complain about weird rectangles on their screen, or to fail to convert because the website isn't as pretty as it could be]
      - jabits 13y ago
        You really do not want to be explaining Javascript to my mom and pop, or most others. (And yes, your parenthetical case at the end? It happened to me in just the last two weeks; coincidence, yes, but it did.)
        PavlovsCat 13y ago
JoshTriplett 13y ago
> Javascript is not required to read articles on the web. Agreed. However, the web consists of far more than just "articles", and quite a bit of content legitimately uses JavaScript for required functionality. Disabling it needs to have the kinds of huge "this will break things" warnings associated with installing an extension like NoScript; it shouldn't have a checkbox in Firefox's preferences.
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  I have a crazy idea: a popup with an explanation the first time the user toggles the feature.
  - abtinf 13y ago
    That's a terrible idea. The explanation would have to be very long - practically an essay. And the only people that will understand the explanation (or even care) are folks who are competent enough to quickly google how to disable javascript through about:config. Increased software complexity and no tangible benefit. Lose-Lose.
    - knowaveragejoe 13y ago
      What? If you can't explain in one sentence the fact that disabling JS will break most websites and it should only be done if you know what you're doing, then you've got bigger problems.
      - pyre 13y ago
        And the 'people that know what they are doing' are the ones that know what about:config is, and how to Google for extensions to disable JavaScript. It's also arguable that an extension that provides an easy 'toggle JavaScript on/off' button is a much better interface than needing to dive into the preferences pane to disable JavaScript (and possibly re-enable it sometimes).
      - UberMouse 13y ago
nhamann 13y ago
It depends on the type of article. I write a lot of blog posts about math. The most convenient way to do this is using Mathjax. If browsers had native support for mathematical notation then I would be inclined to agree with you, but this is not currently the case.
- logn 13y ago
  Can you get away with using unicode chars instead? ... Sounds like this could be a good open source project.
  - nhamann 13y ago
    I don't know how extensive Unicode math symbols are, but it's unclear to me how you would display things like matrices and do alignment of multiline equations.
    - logn 13y ago
      I'm not sure either. But I know that you can do crazy things with unicode, and I'd bet that if you treated treated unicode as a sort of low-level compile-to target you could then design a high-level language from which to write math text. I'm not sure of the practical benefit and maybe this would be even more inaccessible to people... but still, I think JS is great, but wouldn't pure HTML and encodings be even cooler? Food for thought: http://shapecatcher.com/ http://shapecatcher.com/ 🍏
  - lelf 13y ago
    And load fonts with JS?
- lmm 13y ago
  Isn't that what MathML is meant to do? Browser support is incomplete, but it sounds like a perfect use case for a javascript polyfill, so you could make pages that would work with either native browser support or javascript.
millstone 13y ago
I came here to wax rhapsodic about Reader mode too. It's my favorite web browser feature in half a decade. The fact is that most web sites use JavaScript _and_ CSS in a user-hostile manner. CSS is used to draw the eye towards advertising or other content on the site, with the hope of distracting me from what I came to read. Many sites even use CSS to create a faux-popup overlay "window" that has to be dismissed before the content can be viewed. And of course, the vast majority of JavaScript is aimed at analytics, tracking cookies, advertisements, and other code that, as a user, I'd really rather not execute. My ideal solution is something like ClickToPlugin, where a site can request JavaScript, and I can choose to grant it or not. Mozilla's decision is disappointing, because they are working in the interest of web publishers instead of web users.
- lucian1900 13y ago
  Ghostery is great at getting rid of most of that stuff and Adblock removes the rest; one can also disable Adblock per domain. Click to play on plugins is great, Firefox should also have it builtin (as Chrome does).

nwh 13y ago

> Javascript is not required to read articles on the web. Unfortunately, it very much is. Nearly every website on the internet is completely useless without JavaScript. I visited a large number of links from the HN front page, and many of them had broken navigation or images. You can't actually vote on HN itself either.

Nav_Panel 13y ago
Hacker News sans voting is nowhere near completely useless. I strongly suspect that a majority of people who read HN don't even have accounts (and thus are unable to vote). And even if the posts do contain broken links/images, a fair amount of text is often still available; I think a site's textual content is often its most important feature (unless it's a site specifically geared toward images/interactive content). The "1% Rule"[0] grew out of this idea -- the hypothesis it poses is that 89% of the users of a given internet forum are strictly lurkers. HN has a more tech-oriented population than many forums, so I bet the differences between groups are less extreme, but I also bet that the overall trend still stands. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
- veemjeem 13y ago
  Right, but the change isn't targeting you, the hacker news reader. There's dozens of mom & pops out there who have no understanding how browsers work and when they disable javascript, they'll complain that firefox can't render pages as well as IE.
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    Which is two things to me: 1. not a tragedy that can never be fixed, but usually a minor inconvenience 2. one of those random opportunities to learn something, like in this case what Javascript is. Taking away options from users because they don't know well enough can be kind of a self-full-filling prophecy, too. You cater to newbies, you get more and better newbies, entitled ones. Stuff should be nice to use, of course, and shouldn't have friendly green buttons that makes it shoot knives at you etc. but it also shouldn't be less complex than it needs to be. If you have nothing left to take away you have perfection; if you still keep taking away stuff, you don't have even more perfection, you're just breaking things. I never heard anyone complain that this option is there, or that it caused any trouble.. so what is this based on? Where are the petitions to remove this option that causes so much grief? And why stop there? Imagine all the bad stuff you can do with the printer settings. Why are there options that allow people to waste ink, paper, or even maybe damage their printer? How many people threw away their printer, damaging the environment, because they thought it was broken... when all that happened was their cat walking over the keyboard and misconfiguring it? There might be actual kids choking on toxic fumes from those printers right now, nevermind the environment; and we worry about a website not working. The Firefox options dialog is still kind of messy, and would be even if half of the options were removed. Take some leads from Opera :) Just taking away things doesn't automatically help, logically ordering them while also putting them in tiers of expertise does. [By the way, all those keyboard shortcuts? They have to go, "hacker news readers" can get them back by editing an .ini setting -- the risk is just too great that someone might open the dev tools and then complain about weird rectangles on their screen, or to fail to convert because the website isn't as pretty as it could be]
    - jabits 13y ago
      You really do not want to be explaining Javascript to my mom and pop, or most others. (And yes, your parenthetical case at the end? It happened to me in just the last two weeks; coincidence, yes, but it did.)
      - PavlovsCat 13y ago

JoshTriplett 13y ago

> Javascript is not required to read articles on the web. Agreed. However, the web consists of far more than just "articles", and quite a bit of content legitimately uses JavaScript for required functionality. Disabling it needs to have the kinds of huge "this will break things" warnings associated with installing an extension like NoScript; it shouldn't have a checkbox in Firefox's preferences.

PavlovsCat 13y ago
I have a crazy idea: a popup with an explanation the first time the user toggles the feature.
- abtinf 13y ago
  That's a terrible idea. The explanation would have to be very long - practically an essay. And the only people that will understand the explanation (or even care) are folks who are competent enough to quickly google how to disable javascript through about:config. Increased software complexity and no tangible benefit. Lose-Lose.
  - knowaveragejoe 13y ago
    What? If you can't explain in one sentence the fact that disabling JS will break most websites and it should only be done if you know what you're doing, then you've got bigger problems.
    - pyre 13y ago
      And the 'people that know what they are doing' are the ones that know what about:config is, and how to Google for extensions to disable JavaScript. It's also arguable that an extension that provides an easy 'toggle JavaScript on/off' button is a much better interface than needing to dive into the preferences pane to disable JavaScript (and possibly re-enable it sometimes).
    - UberMouse 13y ago

nhamann 13y ago

It depends on the type of article. I write a lot of blog posts about math. The most convenient way to do this is using Mathjax. If browsers had native support for mathematical notation then I would be inclined to agree with you, but this is not currently the case.

logn 13y ago
Can you get away with using unicode chars instead? ... Sounds like this could be a good open source project.
- nhamann 13y ago
  I don't know how extensive Unicode math symbols are, but it's unclear to me how you would display things like matrices and do alignment of multiline equations.
  - logn 13y ago
    I'm not sure either. But I know that you can do crazy things with unicode, and I'd bet that if you treated treated unicode as a sort of low-level compile-to target you could then design a high-level language from which to write math text. I'm not sure of the practical benefit and maybe this would be even more inaccessible to people... but still, I think JS is great, but wouldn't pure HTML and encodings be even cooler? Food for thought: http://shapecatcher.com/ http://shapecatcher.com/ 🍏
- lelf 13y ago
  And load fonts with JS?
lmm 13y ago
Isn't that what MathML is meant to do? Browser support is incomplete, but it sounds like a perfect use case for a javascript polyfill, so you could make pages that would work with either native browser support or javascript.

millstone 13y ago

I came here to wax rhapsodic about Reader mode too. It's my favorite web browser feature in half a decade. The fact is that most web sites use JavaScript _and_ CSS in a user-hostile manner. CSS is used to draw the eye towards advertising or other content on the site, with the hope of distracting me from what I came to read. Many sites even use CSS to create a faux-popup overlay "window" that has to be dismissed before the content can be viewed. And of course, the vast majority of JavaScript is aimed at analytics, tracking cookies, advertisements, and other code that, as a user, I'd really rather not execute. My ideal solution is something like ClickToPlugin, where a site can request JavaScript, and I can choose to grant it or not. Mozilla's decision is disappointing, because they are working in the interest of web publishers instead of web users.

lucian1900 13y ago
Ghostery is great at getting rid of most of that stuff and Adblock removes the rest; one can also disable Adblock per domain. Click to play on plugins is great, Firefox should also have it builtin (as Chrome does).