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Aspects of modern HTML/CSS you may not be familiar with

(lyra.horse)
451 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 28 Aug 25 20:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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keeganpoppen ◴[28 Aug 25 23:12 UTC] No.45058084[source]▶
i will say that though i am predisposed to appreciate and agree with an article like this, any sort of value proposition around "some users don't want javascript" just doesn't... hit for me. and, mind you: i am a card-carrying arch user and have spent more time messing with browser scripting and web crawling, and am more of a True Believer than most. it's just such a niche user preference that i think it should largely be simply ignored. yes, i would love the world to be better for the "noscript" universe, no, i don't think that any individual "grassroots" effort should stake itself on "no javascript" being any part of its utility. i think there are a million other reasons why CSS should win out that are more compelling than an appeal to what feels, extremely ironically, like a callback to the "but 10% of your users use IE6" days... all in all, yes: this is somewhat of a minor point wrt. to the article (which btw i think is great), but i am just calling the "trend", such as it is / has been, for what (i think) it is.
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rebane2001 ◴[28 Aug 25 23:39 UTC] No.45058259[source]▶
fwiw, i've been using the internet with noscript and i find it perfectly usable

for any sites that do need js, i simply enable it for them from the extension, so it never gets in the way with sites i use regularly

it's pretty nice for performance/battery and security

have you ever tried living with noscript for over a week? i feel like your perspective could be a bit mislead, because i felt the exact same way as you before i started using noscript

disclaimer: i'm the author of the blogpost

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1. h4ny ◴[29 Aug 25 03:56 UTC] No.45059996[source]▶
I have been using NoScript for years and I find calling it "perfectly usable" is a bit of a stretch at least for my use case. I can only see it being "perfectly usable" if you only visit mostly the same sites most of the time and have already enabled whatever you need to enable.

I visit new websites all the time because of HN and Reddit, and without JavaScript many sites just don't work or look too broken for me to want to read anything. Unless we collectively decide to stop using buttons instead of anchors for navigation and stop having external, unrelated JavaScript blocking the actual site (that, sometimes funny enough, doesn't require JavaScript to function), it's not going to get any better.

I went through a phase where I think JavaScript is bad and have used CSS instead of JavaScript for a lot of things (mostly because I enjoy writing CSS). The thing is if you have ever tried developing any substantial and moderately complex feature for an actual product with CSS instead of JavaScript, while keeping them readable, maintainable and scalable, you will realize that they are good for different things and talking about them in a mutually exclusive way isn't helpful.

Both CSS and JavaScript are constantly evolving, I agree with you that there are now things that we should do with CSS instead of JavaScript and increasingly more so.