With Javascript disabled the aspect that is a pet peeve isn't some broken functionality of a site (which one would expect) but when a considerable amount of sites add a blank overlay until JS and/or cookies are enabled.
And not the scenario where JS is responsible for loading the content but literally when it's just an arbitrary blank viewport-encompassing element covering the already loaded content—all so the site can then add some animation and remove the overlay when they feel the content should be shown.
It's ridiculous for functionality. When I overhauled a wiki for a project it similarly added such an overlay and I promptly removed it. Nothing on the wiki beside the search was functionally broken without JS yet it required both JS and cookies to be enabled before a user could view anything.
I didn’t say it was broken, I said it was poorly designed.
The internet is decentralized. I won’t tell you that you have to ignore the parts that have been infected by JavaScript nonsense, but you’ll be happier if you do.
Seriously though, I respect the ideal of using HTML as much as possible for what it's made. But the web is more than just pure content sites. And Javascript provides a lot of nice things as well.
There are certainly web apps that could not function without JavaScript. This initiative is more of a protest to shoving functionally useless JavaScript down your throat when you browse a news site or read an article.
JavaScript should progressively enhance those types of websites, and not be a strict requirement.
The web is more than just pure content and, yes, some of it requires JavaScript to function. But it's a lot less than sites actually allow for. We shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of much, much better than the status quo.
I think they block everything for awareness. “Use a reasonable amount of JavaScript day” would not be very memorable. In actuality the right thing to do is leave JavaScript blocked by default, and then think critically about whether or not you trust a site enough to download and run a random program from it. If so, then JavaScript could be enabled.
Ah, haha, CSS naked day was actually first? I do have to admit that most of what I do on the web is consume content and there most JS like analytics and ads is useless to me. So I guess I might actually try NoScript for a day after all.
Completely disabling JavaScript is a no-go these days. But Firefox+NoScript is both enlightening and refreshing. Did you know that CNN tries to run JavaScript from more than 30 domains on the front page, but is functional and ad-free after enabling 2 or 3?
The Add-on allows you to enable or disable specific domains serving JavaScript, and automatically save those preferences for later visits. I find that I only notice the add-on for a few days on a new device before it is tuned. After that, the only thing I notice is how slow and garbage-laden the same sites are when I'm on a computer without my setup using e.g. Chrome
YMMV but I have been NoScript-ing for 2 years and won't go back by choice.
IMHO, NoScript is bad because it discourages you from browsing new sites. As you usually need to first spend 1 minute in the NoScript UI to get the site working.
This also makes it very impractical for day-to-day usage i.e. quickly googling something.
Without NoScript, I need to trust a site well enough to download and run programs from it, in order to check it out. With NoScript, I can at least try to use a site.
If you just browse a site for a little while you can see that it’s a real website, and get a general impression of the place. The set of sites that are both useful, and require JavaScript, is pretty small anyway. So, it isn’t a big loss.
> At that level of paranoia you should use a separate air-gapped device. More secure and, more importantly, more time saving. It will pay off in no time.
This is not a real suggestion, it is an attempt to make my easy middle-ground solution sound ridiculous and impossible by comparing it to something silly like air-gapping my computer. I’m not going for some unattainable perfection. I think the reason people bring this out is that they are uncomfortable with the fact that they are being careless and they want to make even the slightest bit of self-defense sound incomprehensible difficult.
> Completely disabling JavaScript is a no-go these days
Wrong. I use a browser in a VM when needed, and I don't do that very often, maybe once or twice a day. No ads, fast static text, low cpu, very safe, it's pretty damn good.
I don't agree with this, and the site provides very thin or no justification for this claim. "Should" is inherently subjective, so I will not be participating in this event.
In the same spirit as this initiative and uBlock Origin and NoScript:
> Decentraleyes is a free and open-source browser extension used for local content delivery network (CDN) emulation. Its primary task is to block connections to major CDNs such as Cloudflare and Google (for privacy and anti-tracking purposes) and serve popular web libraries (such as JQuery and AngularJS) locally on the user's machine.
Part of this initiative is, I’m sure, to enlighten newer members of the web community to the fact that you can build a large percentage of web pages without JavaScript being required, and that is in fact how we always did it in the past.
Whether or not doing so makes business sense is a different discussion. While I philosophically agree I’m also aware a lot of people have jobs that require being part of the economy of JavaScript garbage at a global scale.
This thing I just looove to see everywhere is $blah_blah$ or \{blah_blah\} or some shite like that. At this point, I should be almost fluent in LaTeX or whatever eldritch tongue these people speak. Perhaps there is a lack of proper authoring tools for MathML? Doesn't Chrome support MathML at least partially these days? I use Firefox so I wouldn't know.
A very worthy initiative. Unfortunately, the CMS my work mandates requires js, so this is a non-starter for me. What I may do, is run my work profile as regular, but turn off js for my non-work profile. I can complain all I like about the work CMS, but that would be fighting a losing battle.
In the same spirit, we should once a year spend a day with ourselves blindfolded, or use a wheelchair to understand what is like to be a disabled person.
I have used noscript + ublock origin for almost a decade now, approving js on some sites is not a big deal and I have had zero issues with malware or popups or other garbage website.
You can tell when a website is a tracker nightmare when it wont load HTML text content without javascript.
Says who? Perhaps popular platforms like twitter or instagram should support UX based on texting instead of requiring apps. Perhaps emails should be readable plaintext and without images. I could go on.
I love all of these ideas in theory; but in practice the ship seems to have sailed - and in a different direction.
I guess it's a mixture of primordial enshittification and old people reminiscing about good old days.
The only time that javascript is required are when you need some element that is stateful accross data loading (maps, audio player, chat,…) or the action would return essentially the same data with a few difference (voting, autocomplete). There are also some components still missing from the web spec like carrousel (you can probably do some css wizardry) and a calendar widget.
But the current state that wants us to download js files that are bigger that the epub format of War and Peace? Not essential.
> But the current state that wants us to download js files that are bigger that the epub format of War and Peace? Not essential.
Absolutely essential if you want to deliver a large, extensible website (requiring teams of front end and back end devs) with modern UX in a cost efficient way.
And not the scenario where JS is responsible for loading the content but literally when it's just an arbitrary blank viewport-encompassing element covering the already loaded content—all so the site can then add some animation and remove the overlay when they feel the content should be shown.
It's ridiculous for functionality. When I overhauled a wiki for a project it similarly added such an overlay and I promptly removed it. Nothing on the wiki beside the search was functionally broken without JS yet it required both JS and cookies to be enabled before a user could view anything.