On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 09:17:22PM -0400, Jonathan M Davis wrote: > On Tuesday, March 13, 2012 01:50:29 Adam D. Ruppe wrote: > > On Tuesday, 13 March 2012 at 00:25:15 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote: > > > But that's a decision based on your needs as a website developer. > > > If JS best suits whatever the needs of a particular website > > > developer are, then they are completely justified in using it, > > > because 99% of the people out there have it enabled in their > > > browsers. > > > > If it takes ten seconds to support 100% of the people out there, why > > not? > > [snip] > > > Now, there *are* cases where you can't do this so easily. > > If you're stuck on poor PHP I'm sure this is harder than > > in D too... but really, do you have one of those cases? > > All I'm saying is that if it makes sense for the web developer to use > javascript given what they're trying to do, it's completely reasonable > to expect that their users will have javascript enabled (since > virtually everyone does). If there's a better tool for the job which > is reasonably supported, then all the better. And if it's easy to > provide a workaround for the lack of JS at minimal effort, then great. > But given the fact that only a very small percentage of your user base > is going to have JS disabled, it's not unreasonable to require it and > not worry about the people who disable it if that's what you want to > do. [...]
The complaint is not with using JS when it's *necessary*. It's with using JS *by default*. It's with using JS just because you can, even when it's *not needed* at all. It's like requiring you to have a TV just to make a simple phone call. Sure, you can do cool stuff like hooking up the remote end's webcam to the TV and other such fluff like that. But *requiring* all of that for a *phone call*? Totally unnecessary, and a totally unreasonable requirement, even if 95% (or is that 99.9%?) of all households own a TV. (And for the record, I don't own one, and do not plan to. I know I'm in the minority. That doesn't negate the fact that such a requirement is unreasonable.) OTOH if you want to *watch a movie*, well, then requiring a TV is completely reasonable. The problem today is that JS is the "next cool thing", so everyone is jumping on the bandwagon, and everything from a single-page personal website to a list of links to the latest toaster oven requires JS to work, even when it's not necessary at all. That's the silliness of it all. T -- Computers shouldn't beep through the keyhole.
