i absolutely hate how the modern web just fails to load if one has javascript turned off. i, as a user, should be able to switch off javascript and have the site work exactly as it does with javascript turned on. it’s not a hard concept, people.
but you ask candidates to explain “graceful degradation” and they’ll sit and look at you with a blank stare.
You must log in or register to comment.
Funny, from my standpoint, more functional JavaScript almost always feels like service degradation - as in, the more I block, the better and the faster the website runs.
personally I think this is mostly due to for some reason people tend to give up on visiting a website if it takes more than a second or two to load(guilty as charged though), so instead they load a mostly blank page (which gives the sign that its loading) and then use javascript to load the rest of the content in.
that and fucking ads galore
that and fucking ads galore
And trackers.
And Javascript that give you the time in the page, as if you didn’t have a clock on your desktop.
And Javascript that give you a fake chat window to talk to a shitty AI nobody wants in the bottom-right corner.
And Javascript to annoy you with GDPR shit everybody absent-mindedly clicks away anyway.
And Javascript to inform you that the site uses cookies, as if it mattered since it won’t work without cookies.
And Javascript that nags you for a subscription or stops you scrolling to force you to create an account.
…And of course, all that is done by loading megabytes and megabytes of shit recursively from a kajillion nested addresses because web “developers” couldn’t code tight code if their lives depended on it. All they do is import pre-chewed shit that acts as trojans for big data players to plant more trackers and more ads in your browser, just to serve up barf people by and large don’t give a shit about.
Graceful degradation - pfft.
Progressive enhancement - yeah!
this is the way
Graceful degradation is for people that are angry about the future. Progressive enhancement is for people that respect the past. And it’s stupid to not hire someone only because they don’t know a term that you know.
Are you lost? I didn’t talk about hiring practices.
I was referring to OP’s post because they mentioned “candidates”. I was also agreeing with your comment regarding progressive enhancement lol
It’s worse than this even. I have an old Raspberry Pi 3B+ (1G) that I got in 2018. I hooked it up the other day to mess around with it, it’s been maybe 2 years since I did anything with it, ever since I got a Pi 4 (4G). 1 gigabyte of RAM is now insufficient to browse the web. The machine freezes when loading any type of interactive site. Web dev is now frameworks piled on frameworks with zero consideration for overhead and it’s pure shit. Outrageous.
You want to see terrible try looking at the network tab in inspect element
“Modern” pages load hundreds of large assets instead of keeping it smaller and clean.
its also cdn on cdn nobody does local libraries anymore
It’s encouraged to use things with a supply chain easily poisoned.
There’s the issue of a Heisenberg effect here - when a spectator is present, like a huge audit of something, nothing happens, and when a spectator isn’t present, there’s nobody to look every day in piles of constantly changed crap to detect if something happens.
Also not even easily poisoned, but easily denied. It’s about control. The militaries and producers of complex industrial equipment were the first to start doing this, however nuts that may seem. It’s useful to sell your allies a system they can use, but only when allowed. Or sell industrial equipment that can’t be smuggled to a third country without your permission.
These things - they are legal even morally, but at some point in discussion of them common good might arise as a thing in itself, separate from morality. For the common good such systems of control are clear poison.
I wrote my CV site in React and Next.js configured for SSG (Static Site Generation) which means that the whole site loads perfectly without JavaScript, but if you do have JS enabled you’ll get a theme switching and print button.
That said, requiring JS makes sense on some sites, namely those that act more like web apps that let you do stuff (like WhatsApp or Photopea). Not for articles, blogs etc. though.
I did mine in plain old HTML. No JavaScript.
requiring JS makes sense on some sites, namely those that act more like web apps that let you do stuff (like WhatsApp
I mean yes, but Whatsapp is a bad example. It could easily use no JavaScript. In the end it’s the same as Lemmy or any other forum. You could post a message, get a new page with the message. Switching chats is loading a new page. Of course JavaScript enhances the experience, makes it more fluid, etc, but messengers could work perfectly fine without JavaScript.
Maybe I’m out of the loop because I do mostly backend, but how do you update the chat window when new chats come in, without JavaScript?
You don’t, I’m saying it would still mostly work. Getting messages as they arrive is nice but not necessary. For example, I personally have all notifications off, and I only see messages when I specifically look for them, no one can reach me instantly. Everyone seems to be missing that we’re talking about degradation here, it degrades, it gets worse with JS disabled. But it shouldn’t straight up not work.
A good example for something that does not work without JS would have been a drawing application like they said, or games, there are plenty of things that literally do not work without JS, but messaging is not one of them. Instant messaging would be of course.
Did you just propose degrading instant messengers back into email? 😂
How exactly do you propose people actually chat with such a system? Continuously hammering F5 while being actively engaged with another person? 😂
I also feel like everyone seems to be missing that we’re taking about degradation, which isn’t usually “no js at all”, it’s some subset that isn’t supported. People use feature detection to find out of some feature is supported in the browser and if it’s not the they don’t enable the feature the depends on it.
For the chat example, you could argue that a chat can degrade into a bulletin board, but I’d argue that people use chat for realtime messaging so js is needed for the base use case.
If your webpage primarily just displays static information, then I agree that it should work without js or css. Like Wikipedia, or a blog, or news, or a product marketing page, or a forum/BBS.
But there is a huge part of the web that this simply doesn’t apply to, and it’s not realistic to have them put in huge effort to support what can only be a broken experience for a fraction of a percent of users.
How would a page fetch new messages for you without JS?
You don’t. That’s the gracefull degradation part. You can still read your chat history and send new messages, but receiving messages as they come requires page reload or enabling js.
my only issue with this ideology(the require page load) is, this setup would essentially require a whole new processing system to handle, as instead of it being sent via events, it would need to be rendered and sent server side. This also forces the server to load everything at once instead of dynamically like how it currently does, which will increase strain/load on the server node that is displaying the web page, while also removing the potential of service isolation between the parts of the web page meaning if one component goes down(such as chat history), the entire page handler goes down, while also decreasing page response and load times. That’s the downside of those old legacy style pages. They are a pain in the ass to maintain, run slower and don’t have much fallover ability.
It’s basically asking the provider to spend more to: make the service slower, remove features from the site (both information and functionality wise) and have a more complex setup when scaling, to increase compatibility for a minor portion of the current machines and users out there.
this is of course also ignoring the increase request load as you are now having to resend entire webpages to get data instead of just messages/updates too.
The web interface can already be reloaded at any time and has to do all of this. You seem to be missing we’re talking about degradation here, remember the definition of the word, it means it isn’t as good as when JS is enabled. The point is it should still work somehow.
Just to make sure we are on the same page then, cause I don’t see the issue with my post.
I am using the term “Graceful Degradation” which is meant as a fault tolerance for tech stacks to allow for a critical component to be removed.
This critical component people are talking about is Javascript which is used for all dynamically loaded content, and used for fallover protection so one service going down doesn’t make it so the entire page goes down (also an example of fault tolerance).
The proposed solution given would remove that fault tolerance for the reasons I provided in the original reply, while degrading the users experience due to increased page load time (users reloading the page inconsistently vs consistently to get new information) and increasing maintenance costs and overhead on the provider.
Additionally, the new processing system that you mentioned already exists generally doesn’t, because they(websites) mostly use a dynamic load style nowadays, not a static(as in the client doesn’t change it) page, which is what this type of system would require.
note: edits were for phrasing, and a typo
How would you solve end-to-end encryption without JavaScript?
Blame the ui frameworks like react for this. It’s normalized a large cross-section of devs not learning anything about how a server works. They’ve essentially grown up with a calculator without ever having to learn long division.
Not all frameworks are bad
The problem is the devs/owners not understanding basic fundamentals. They could see a major financial benefit if they make the page snappy and light but apparently no one at these companies realizes that.
the depressing reality is that 95% of business owners are comically incompetent
PE from server rendering only to a full interactive SPA in the browser is really not trivial both for frameworks and app devs
there are a handful of frameworks that support it fairly ergonomically now but it’s a discipline that takes time and effort
also disabling javascript is a tiny minority use case
Fair, some websites do need JavaScript though. Such as webapps. Could they be server-side rendered?
Depending on the web app, the real solution would be a much more simplified JavaScript free version
Why spend time and money on something that will end up being only half functional. It costs money to support that.
For the sake of graceful degredation, that’s the whole point of the post
Yes. Web apps existed before JavaScript.
SSR is a thing and could be used to render most content remotely without pissing off readers.
They know ssr is a thing which is why they used that term. But ssr produces a static page or static component, where webapps often require some level of interactivity for their basic functionality, such as reacting to server events. They’re asking if that can be achieved with ssr
JavaScript is needed to actually build anything useful. It is way easier to maintain and when done properly it can be very fast to load and use.
The problem with today’s web is that pages are extremely inefficient and bloated. You can keep the same UI just don’t try to use every framework and library under the sun. Also it would be nice if people actually formated assets properly instead of using tons of large images and other assets.
JavaScript is needed to actually build anything useful
Not even close. I wrote a management system for the keyfobs at my makerspace. I had some JavaScript in there previously for things like loading up logs with pagination over ajax calls or searching for members by name. I took all that out and made it straight server side HTML. It’s fast, takes minimal browser memory, and the back button works with zero fuss.
Just try making an application that way sometime. Yes, you can find places for targeted use of JavaScript, but every web dev should at least try making a project without it.
It’s not the bulk of your point (of which I agree with) but your mention of the back button reminded me how much I despise – sometimes above everything else – how much these sites override basic functionality of the browser, overriding inbuilt history navigation, screwing up Ctrl click behaviors, stealing my right-click menu or default key bindings.
There’s a lot of reasons one might not want to use TikTok but the reason that stops me before even having to consider other reasons (but I can’t really explain to most people) is that it’s a site designed without any really respect or regard for the user.
Alt+d doesn’t work and Ctrl+l pops up some modal about logging in. I can’t open any of the recommended videos in a new tab because they clearly must’ve just done them as
onclicks and not real anchor tags so right clicking doesn’t give me the option and neither does Ctrl clicking (which – also – that’s…got to be an accessibility violation, right?). And more than half the time the full page doesn’t even load because it’s such a strangle of resources that it needs me to click a button on the page because it wasn’t able to load the videos listing of an account in time.The whole thing is just a nightmare in terms of design and primarily not even in terms of inefficiency but direct hostility to UX. Absolute garbage.
JavaScript is needed to actually build anything useful
Tell this to the people who build things you would call today a “Webapp” with CGI written in C.
So many basic pages are still done as an SPA when they’d work fine as a postback form. It’s infuriating, but web development is rife with magic hammers.
People get so mad about JavaScript then load a dozen 10mb unoptimized image files.
I’m sure you have something different in mind than me when you say JavaScript is way easier to maintain.
JavaScript is needed to actually build anything useful.
Underage user detected!
Not even possible to reply to this post using the Lemmy Web UI without having Javascript enabled; the reply button doesn’t function without Javascript.
a lot doesn’t work on piefed but thankfully replying does (just tested it)
It’s impressive that for a technology that’s supposed to be better than Mastodon (bloated) or Reddit (ass-corporate), Lemmy still relies on the same basic evils.
it’s not a hard concept, people.
Depends. Webapps are a thing, and without JavaScript, there isn’t much to show at all.
Websites that mostly serve static content though? Yeah. Some of them can’t even implement a basic one-line message that asks to turn on JavaScript; just a completely white page, even though the data is there. I blame the multiple “new framework every week” approach. Doubly so for sites that starts loading, actually shows the content, and then it loads some final element that just cover everything up.
It depends. Inertia.js can pre-render pages server side, so you don’t need JavaScript to see the content.
React can do SSR, too. The issue is that some sites actually means nothing if not dynamic. It makes sense to have SSR and sprinkle some JS on the client for content delivery, no issue there.
The web isn’t just HTML and server side scripting anymore. A modern website uses Javascript for many key essentials of the site’s operation. I’m not saying that’s always a good thing, but it is a true thing.
It is no longer a reasonable expectation that a website work with JavaScript disabled in the browser. Most of the web is now in content management systems that use JavaScript for browser support, accessibility, navigation, search, analytics and many aspects of page rendering and refreshing.
The web isn’t just HTML and server side scripting anymore. A modern website uses Javascript for many key essentials of the site’s operation.
which is why the modern web is garbage
Love it when a page loads, and it’s just a white blank. Like, you didn’t even try. Do I want to turn JS on or close the tab? Usually, I just close the tab and move on. Nothing I need to see here.
React tutorial are like that. You create a simple HTML page with a script and the script generates everything.
I had to do a simple webpage for an embedded webserver and the provider of the library recommended preact, the lightweight version of react. Having no webdev experience, I used preact as recommended and it is a nightmare to use and debug.
So that’s why.
If it’s a standard webpage that only displays some static content, then sure.
But everything that needs to be interactive (and I’m talking about actual interactivity here, not just navigation) requires Javascript and it’s really not worth the effort of implementing fallbacks for everything just so you can tell your two users who actually get to appreciate this effort that the site still won’t work because the actual functionallity requires JavaScript.
It all comes down to what the customer is ready to pay for and usually they’re not ready to pay for anything besides core functionallity. Heck, I’m having a hard enough time getting budget for all the legally required accessibility. And sure, some of that no script stuff pays into that as well, but by far not everything.
Stuff like file uploads, validated forms and drag and drop are just not worth the effort of providing them without JS.
The business customer or the visitor?
The visitor doesn’t exactly have a way to give feedback on whether they’d use a static page.
Stuff like file uploads, validated forms and drag and drop are just not worth the effort of providing them without JS.
Honestly many of today’s frameworks allow you to compile the same thing for the Web, for Java for Android, for Java for main desktop OS’es and whatever else.
Maybe if it can’t work like a hypertext page, it shouldn’t be one.
The business customer who actually pays for the development.
Maybe if you can’t use the web without disabling JS, you shouldn’t?
Progressive Web Apps are the best tool for many jobs right now because they run just about everywhere and opposed to every single other technology we’ve had up until now they have the potential to not look like complete shit!
And the whole cross compilation that a lot of these frameworks promise is a comete pipe dream. It works only for the most basic of use cases. PWAs are the first and so far only technology I’ve used that doesn’t come with a ton of extra effort for each supported plattfrom down the line.
The business customer who actually pays for the development.
Then it’s my duty as a responsible customer to not make it profitable for them, as much as I can.
Maybe if you can’t use the web without disabling JS, you shouldn’t?
Suppose I can use the Web with JS disabled. Just that page won’t be part of my Web.
Yes, of course when the optimization work has been done for you, it’s the easiest.
It’s an old discussion about monopolies, monocultures, standards, anti-monopoly regulations, where implicit consent is a thing and where it isn’t, and how to make free market stable.
file uploads and forms are the easiest to do server side
Not if you want them to be at least halfway user friendly. Form validation is terrible when done completely server side, and several input elements like multiselect dropdowns, comboboxes and searchfields won’t work at all unless supported by client side JavaScript. And have you ever tried to do file previews and upload progress bars purly serverside?
So I guess by fileupload you mean “drop file here and wait an uncertain amount of time for the server to handle the file without any feedback whatsoever.” and by forms you mean “enter your data here, then click submit and if we feel charitable we may reward you with a long list of errors you made. Some of which could have been avoided if you knew about them while filling in previous fields”.
It depends on the type of input validation you’re doing, a bunch of it is built into the browser and you don’t need JS for it.
So - the situation is understood, but the question arises, what does this have in common with a global hypertext system for communication.
Maybe all this functionality should be removed into a kind of plugin, similarly to how it was done with Flash and Java applets and other ancient history. Maybe sandboxed, yes.
Maybe the parts of that kind of plugin relating to DOM, to execution, to interfaces should be standardized.
Maybe such a page should look more like a LabView control model or like a Hypercard application, than what there is now.
One huge benefit would be that Google goes out of business.
It depends on what you are doing
Developers are still familiar with the concept, there are even ideas like server side rendering in react to make sites more SEO friendly.
I think the biggest issue is that there is very little business reason to support these users. Sites can be sued over a lack of accessibility and they can lose business from bad ux, so they are going to focus in those two areas ten times out of ten before focusing on noscript and lynx users. SEO might be a compelling reason to support it, but only companies that really have their house in order focus in those concerns.
I’ve spent the last year building a Lemmy and PieFed client that requires JavaScript. This dependency on JavaScript allows me to ship you 100% static files, which after being fully downloaded, have 0 dependency on a web server. Without JavaScript, my cost of running web servers would be higher, and if I stopped paying for those servers, the client would stop working immediately. Instead, I chose to depend heavily on JavaScript which allows me to ship a client that you can fully download, if you choose, and run on your own computer.
As far as privacy, when you download my Threadiverse client* and inspect network requests, you will see that most of the network requests it makes are to the Lemmy/PieFed server you select. The 2 exceptions being any images that aren’t proxied via Lemmy/PieFed, and when you login, I download a list of the latest Lemmy servers. If I relied on a web server for rendering instead of JavaScript, many more requests would be made with more opportunities to expose your IP address.
I truly don’t understand where all this hate for JavaScript comes from. Late stage capitalism, AI, and SAS are ruining the internet, not JavaScript. Channel your hate at big tech.
*I deliver both web and downloadable versions of my client. The benefits I mentioned require the downloaded version. But JavaScript allows me to share almost 100% code between the web and downloaded versions. In the future, better PWA support will allow me to leverage some of these benefits on web.
Problem is so many websites are slow for no good reason.
And JS is being used to steal our info and push aggressive advertisment.
Which part is unknown to you?
Problem is so many websites are slow for no good reason.
Bad coding is a part of it. “It works on my system, where the server is local and I’m opening the page on my overclocked gamer system”. Bad framework is also a part of it. React, for example, decided that running code is free, and bloated their otherwise very nice system to hell. It’s mildly infuriating moving from a fast, working solution to something that decided to implements basic language features as a subset of the language itself.
Trackers, ads, dozen (if not hundreds) of external resources, are also a big part of it. Running decent request blocking extensions (stuff like ublock origin) adds a lot of work to loading a page, and still makes them seems more reactive because of the sheer amount of blocked resources. It’s night and day.
Problem is so many trains are ugly for no good reason.
And steel is being used to shoot people and stab people aggressively.
I don’t understand why we are blaming the stealing info part on JavaScript and not the tech industry. Here is an article on how you can be tracked (fingerprinted) even with JavaScript disabled. As for slow websites, also blame the tech industry for prioritizing their bottom line over UX and not investing in good engineering.
The matter is not javascript per se but the use companies and new developers do, if everyone used like you there would probably be no problem. A gazillion dependencies and zero optimization, eating up cpu, spying on us, advertisements…
And if you try and use an alternative browser you know many websites won’t work.
You’re correct, and I’m going to explain how this happens. I’m not justifying that it happens, just explaining it.
It isn’t that no one knows what graceful degradation is anymore. It’s that they don’t try to serve every browser that’s existed since the beginning of time.
When you develop software, you have to make some choices about what clients you’re going to support, because you then need to test for all those clients to ensure you haven’t broken their experience.
With ever-increasing demands for more and more software delivery to drive ever greater business results, developers want to serve as few clients as possible. And they know exactly what clients their audience use - this is easy to see and log.
This leads to conversations like: can we drop browser version X? It represents 0.4% of our audience but takes the same 10% of our testing effort as the top browser.”
And of course the business heads making the demands on their time say yes, because they don’t want to slow down new projects by 10% over 0.4% of TAM. The developers are happy because it’s less work for them and fewer bizarre bugs to deal with from antiquated software.
Not one person in this picture will fight for your right to turn off JavaScript just because you have some philosophy against it. It’s really no longer the “scripting language for animations and interactivity” on top of HTML like it used to be. It’s the entire application now. 🤷♂️
If it helps you to blame the greedy corporate masters who want to squeeze more productivity out of their engineering group, then think that. It’s true. But it’s also true that engineers don’t want to work with yesteryear’s tech or obscure client cases, because that experience isn’t valuable for their career.
This has to be fixed though. I don’t know, how, but it’s an economic situation bringing enormous damage every moment.
And most of people it affects are, like me, in countries where real political activism is impossible.
This is the next thing that should be somehow resolved like child labor, 8-hour workdays, women’s voting rights and lead paint. Interoperability and non-adversarial standards of the global network.
enormous
It isn’t though. Thats the exact point. It’s a moderate effort that would prevent infinitesimal damage. That’s just not good math. People have to prioritize their time. If you have a numbers case to make about why the damage is so enormous, make it. That’s what it will take to be convincing: numbers.
It is. It’s like the medieval Sound Toll, you can’t measure it well enough because there are no trade routes between the Baltic and the North Sea other than the Sound, the Kiel channel is not yet a thing.
What should be fixed is people. The above described logic is true, it does really happen, and behind it is the idiot desire: to get more money. Not to make a better thing, not to make someone’s life better, not to build something worthwhile - in other words, nothing that could get me out of bed in the morning. When that’s the kind of desires fueling most companies and societies, all things will be going in all kinds of wrong ways
That can’t be fixed. We can’t wait for a different kind of human (what if it’ll be an artificial psychopath anyway) to fix our current thing.
So hard to disrupt means of organizing (for associations, unions and such, unofficial) and building electoral systems (for Internet communities even, why not) are needed ; social media gave people a taste of that to lure them before subverting it all, but the idea is good.
Some sort of a global system. When it’s in place, improvement around will follow.
It can be fixed: we can choose to produce less idiots and more caring people. You are right, of course, that it is not the only thing we should be doing
the idiot desire to get more money
Yes, but we don’t have to make a total caricature out if it. We all need to prioritize our time. That isn’t evil, or broken, or wrong. That’s just life.
Expand this, please. I am sure I did not get you
Developers having a narrower list of browsers to support is not ONLY about greed. You say it is NOT about making something that works to improve people’s lives. And I disagree with that.
You can’t build a good piece of software and try To support every client under the sun since the beginning of time. There is a reasonable point to draw some lines and prioritize.
So while greed is ONE factor, you seem to be saying it’s the only factor, and that people are stupid and broken for doing this. That’s going too far.
It’s unrealistic to expect perfection. Today people want comprehensive client support. Tomorrow they will be outraged at some bug. But few realize: you may have to pick between the two. Because having zero bugs is a lot more achievable if you can focus on a small list of current browser clients. That’s just a fact. The next day they will be upset that there are ads in the site, but it may be ad revenue that pays for developers to fix all the bugs for all browser clients under the sun.
People love to rant online about how NO you should give me EVERYTHING and do it for FREE but this is childish tantruming and has no relationship to reality. Devs are not an endless resource that just gives and gives forever. They are regular people who need to go home at night like anyone else.
I am saying it is about greed because it actually is, since I am yet to see a situation where the ultimate filter for supporting/dropping a client is NOT revenue from people using that client, and here I am talking specifically about companies making money on their product, so no open source, subsidised, hobby projects etc.
Peole love to rant online
They do, now try to catch precisely me doing this
