[notapenny]

No, we can't.

We can't agree on your stance, because other people have different stances. You may have some reason why you want JS and cookies disabled, but many people don't. JS has been a part of the internet for as long as I've been alive. Sure, it's being used different and sometimes needlessly as with the blog you noted, but it's here and it's not going anywhere.

If you want the web to be cookieless and JS-less, you can disable them. But the web is not cookieless and JS-less. You get the experience you want. You can't expect everyone to want that experience.

[JohnFen]

Whatever happened to the notion that web pages should fail gracefully? That is, they should be able to function in the absence of JS and cookies. Perhaps not fully functional or as pretty, but they should work.

I've long considered websites that fail to do this to be poorly engineered.

[notapenny]

I suppose that notion went away _because_ of JS and cookies.

Looking at it from a business perspective, it's also a matter of cost. How big a percentage of people have JS off (I searched a bit and everything suggests low single digits, 1-2%), versus how much time do I spend making sure the site is somewhat functional to serve these people. And does somewhat functional make sense? Can they see my site but they can't go into my sales funnel without me making HTML-equivalent pages? In that case why would I bother unless that percentage of users grows to where it becomes financially interesting to me?

Still, would be nice if most sites would at least render some plain HTML fallback with a bit of info, instead of a single line on a white page saying "this doesn't work".

[sofixa]

It went away when not having JS enabled stop being a regular thing ( what, 2010? At the latest!). Before that there were users with very old browsers, or asinine corporate "security" policies that didn't have JS; nowadays it's only luddites longing for HTML-only websites ( we must have lived in different times because those were just terrible to read, especially if you had a nonstandard (for the developer) screen size), aka a negligible amount of internet users. It's a pretty safe bet to not even test what happens when JS is enabled.

[Scarblac]

It was a notion I've heard formulated a few times, but who has ever had a product manager who cared about it?

To me, the browser is an application platform. That it originated as a document viewer is historical trivia.

[damir]

I'm perfectly fine with using cookies and JS, in fact I use them daily in my webapps...

But please, please do render html _without_ requiring JS to do so... That's my main issue - getting blank white page on a simple text based html page like the one mentioned before...

[notapenny]

Yeah that's very poor practice. I get why your site may require JS and have nothing for me if I turn it off, but do at least render some fallback with a bit of info so I know what I'm missing, how/where to contact and might be enticed to turn it on again.

[baash05]

Why bother? If a user comes to a page with JS off, they know why they get nothing.

[ksec]

>No, we can't.

>If you want the web to be cookieless and JS-less

Where did the author explicitly asked for the web to be cookieless and JS-less?

All he asked was for the page to be showing HTML. And furthering inferring, may be pages could use less JS when they not needed?

[isitmadeofglass]

No, we can't. We can't agree on your stance, because other people have different stances. You may have some reason why you want the blink tag disabled, but many people don't. The blink tag has been a part of the internet for as long as I've been alive. Sure, it's being used different and sometimes needlessly as with the blog you noted, but it's here and it's not going anywhere. If you want the web to be blink tag-less, you can disable it. But the web is not blink tag-less. You get the experience you want. You can't expect everyone to want that experience. /S

[ghusto]

> No, we can't.

Well, we can. Some people here have even suggested just _how_ we can, so it's not that we can't. We're just not. You know, for reasons.

> We can't agree on your stance, because other people have different stances.

We can't agree on your stance on racism because other people have different stances.

To put my point less facetiously; opinions aren't the end of a discussion, they're the beginning. Presumably these stances you speak of are based on something. Well okay, this guys stance is based on something too. Discuss the merits of each and you can arrive at one stance that's more correct than the other. Unless of course one of you stops at some point in the discussion and says "Yeah, well, that's just like, your opinion, man".

[hdjjhhvvhga]

> JS has been a part of the internet for as long as I've been alive.

I think it might be the cause of the problem some of us have with today's bloated Web. Sure, it wasn't ideal and definitely it wasn't pretty, but it was way more usable than today.