this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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Why care about the no-JS experience? (gomakethings.com)
submitted 19 hours ago by dilaw@futurology.today to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] Vincent@feddit.nl 21 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (3 children)

Note there's a group of users that larger than the group of users without JS (for whatever reason): users of assistive technology. And they don't even have a choice.

While I'm all for considering the needs of every user... If you get to the point where you're worrying about no-JS users, I hope you've already considered the needs of people with disabilities, whether temporary or permanent.

Edit: oh right, wanted to add: just making a site work without JS doesn't automatically make it accessible to people with special needs.

[–] wewbull@feddit.uk 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

They overlap. Js is a shit technology for the blind.

Dynamic sites that move / hide / unhide components as you do things are unhelpful and confusing. A screen reader will tell you what's under the cursor right now. If that changes, you don't get notified that you're now pointing at something else.

Static sites are better for accessibility too.

[–] Vincent@feddit.nl 1 points 5 hours ago

They can overlap, yes. Static sites are definitely not automatically better for accessibility.

[–] ozr@programming.dev 10 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (2 children)

No-JS pages that fully comply with WAI ARIA are much better for users of assistive technology than any single page web app can ever hope to be. All the myriad states that an interactive JS page can enter are absolutely never ever properly tested for disabled users, and even after full expensive testing, just a little change in the JS can ruin it all again. While with WAI ARIA you can just quickly assert that the page is compliant with a checker before pushing it to live.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 3 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (2 children)

This is both factually incorrect, and ignores the original point.

First of all, no you cannot just run an automatic WAI ARIA checker. That will highlight some surface level basic structural issues but in no way is adequate testing for a pleasant accessible UX.

Secondly, modern frameworks like React and Angular have the same ARIA validation utilities. It does not matter whether components are loaded in dynamically by the framework as long as they're defined in the codebase where linters and code analyzers can run.

Thirdly, you're ignoring the actual point that is being made. You know as well as I do, that virtually nowhere actually puts serious effort and usability testing into websites making sure their websites are accessible, and that directly impacts the lives of millions of people who are cut off from the world of technology because of a disability.

Until you're making all of your websites and apps accessible by second nature (i.e. until at a bare minimum you have your Web Accessibility Specialist certification), then focusing your time and efforts on catering to a niche ideological no JS crowd is quite frankly somewhat cruel and self serving.

[–] Vincent@feddit.nl 1 points 5 hours ago

Heh, just deleted my reply - thanks for covering all that, you're exactly right :)

[–] andioop@programming.dev 3 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

If you want to learn the stuff necessary for that certification, here's a document, the WAS Body of Knowledge listing what you need to know and maybe where you can learn that. Less detailed version in the WAS Exam Content Outline.

[–] Static_Rocket@lemmy.world 4 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Doesn't avoiding JS typically structure a website in such a way that the browsers built-in assistive services can cover it easier?

[–] Vincent@feddit.nl 1 points 5 hours ago

Not necessarily, unfortunately. (Though I guess technically it's easier to throw up barriers using JS, but it's not an inherent quality, and leaving it out doesn't automatically make it good.)

[–] GoOnASteamTrain@lemmy.ml 9 points 10 hours ago

Hmm...this has me thinking, maybe I'll change up my Hugo site a little, so that there's no dropdown menu - it's the only thing javascript is needed for.

Thank you for this, some points that I'd not even considered, and a helpful reminder to myself to try and get that javascript from 99% to 100% unused. :)

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 7 points 11 hours ago

People should not be prioritizing no-JS users. No one turns off JavaScript.

If you keep the JS to a minmum, you have

  1. less work maintining that shit, HTML/CSS is patient
  2. better user experience

So much forms and textboxes don't save content anymore after a reload, because it's dynamically loaded from somewhere or even a frame handled entirely by JS. Buttons/Checkboxes that don't work, it's sad.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 6 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Not to mention, more accessible.

[–] SpicyLizards@reddthat.com 20 points 16 hours ago

Sadly, the rise of frameworks and SAAS have really killed security and accessibility through enforcement of JS.

'Back in the day' performance, download size, backwards compatibility, and non-js functionality was expected. Now it's not even on the radar for most big corps/agencies. Many places I've worked don't even care about responsiveness, which is crazy.

Now, there are so many 25mb websites that are unusable without JS or the right device...

[–] PunkRockSportsFan@fanaticus.social 40 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

JavaScript sucks. I hate using it I hate coding it.

I whitelist js sources on my personal computer.

Only absolutely necessary for function scripts get loaded.

If they ask me to disable the adblocker I blacklist the domain.

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 31 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (2 children)

I've done more than 18 years of dev work. I only hate js. All the other parts of the job are fine. Other languages are fine as well. I've had to learn so many. Hell I know cobol right along side ruby.

Js sucks. It sucks to debug. Its frameworks still have issues with basic stuff like many to many relationships.

All the solutions that don't use or use it sparingly work for years. The ones that rely on the language usually die a firey death by npm/yarn or get deprecated within 6 months.

[–] Zos_Kia@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 10 hours ago

Its frameworks still have issues with basic stuff like many to many relationships.

Not sure what you mean by that. Do you mean ORMs? Which one and when did you try it?

[–] PunkRockSportsFan@fanaticus.social 16 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Js frameworks make php frameworks seems stable efficient and logical by comparison.

Yikes.

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 11 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Modern day php and laravel is actually not terrible.

But yeah I agree with you.

[–] msage@programming.dev -2 points 10 hours ago

Laravel is shit.

I can believe it became popular only because devs don't care about the code.

[–] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 7 points 15 hours ago

Javascript is like Dungeons and dragons. It's a mess, weighed down by legacy decisions, too heavy in some places and too light in others, and used in far more places than it should be. It also has some diehard fans, and some diehard fans who have never used anything else.

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca -1 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

Lmao, oh yes, let's go back to the golden age of every app having all of its logic running on centralized servers, rather being able to easily create cross platform client side distributed applications.

The "no-js" philosophy is fundamentally at odds with a future of distributed, OS agnostic, application development.

It remembers the web when the web was simpler, and ignores that that was the era of dll hell and applications being locked to specific OSes. The modern web is the most successful cross platform development framework by orders of magnitude,it's all based on open internationally agreed on standards, and it is vastly simplifying and detangling the overall computing environment / platforms that we used to be locked to.

Just use a framework like Nextjs or it's open source off shoots / clones and get the best of both static pre rendering and dynamic on the fly rendering.

[–] nomugisan@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

#1 popup and tracker enjoyer over here

[–] masterspace@lemmy.ca 0 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

I use utilities like unlock origin, a pihole, etc to block trackers and ad network requests without blocking literally all logic that can run on a page, which works great as an interim solution.

And the long term solution to advertising and tracking is legislation, not throwing out a computer's ability to compute.

[–] nomugisan@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Personally I think it's better if WWW moves beyond HTTP as a protocol

[–] twice_hatch@midwest.social 1 points 4 hours ago

HTTP is really nice. We should move beyond HTML as a document format

[–] termaxima@programming.dev 3 points 12 hours ago

Can confirm I’m one of those people with JS off and a pretty strict whitelist !

[–] tauren@lemm.ee 0 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

A lot of people who shared this sentiment were hung up on the idea that “no one turns off JS.” But some people do, for a variety of good reasons!

What % are we talking about? 50%, 25%, 10%, 1%, 0.1%? People make choices, but those are their choices. I need to get the job done and I can't cater to everyone's needs.

[–] Corbin@programming.dev 3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Forget about your job for a moment. In general, why are you willing to set a threshold on how accessible your work is? I urge you to forget about how callous your employer wants you to be.

[–] tauren@lemm.ee -2 points 8 hours ago

You call people callous for using js? 😂 Sorry, I'm not interested in a conversation with a fanatic because that kind of arguments have zero value.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 hours ago

And who has to maintain it, not you?