[davisr]

No one should need JS to see the soups when that could be handled perfectly fine with CSS. I wish restaurants would just make their homepage a PDF of the menu.

[venturecruelty]

No one should need an entire PostScript interpreter to see the soup of the day, either. A restaurant menu is text and images. HTML and CSS are perfect for text and images.

[andai]

Nobody should need 60 million lines of code (Linux Kernel 30M + Chromium 30M) to render some text and images ;)

[hunter2_]

I agree with no JS, but why PDF over HTML? Hard-wrapping for letter-sized paper (ok, a PDF doesn't need to be letter-sized, but most menus are approximately that) with crapshoot reflow options for soft-wrapping in certain viewer apps is pretty dicey on a phone, mitigated only slightly by rotating the phone sideways.

The only benefit I can think of is if it leads to more frequent updates by the restaurant, due to limited skillset.

[ok123456]

If the restaurant doesn't have anything besides a menu, /index.pdf is fine—no web design required; reuse the menu they're printing anyway.

The trade-off is that they'll have to pinch/zoom if they have a small display. It's a minor inconvenience to make the exact information they want available instantly.

[neuroelectron]

The complexity between the modern web and a pdf is marginal. PDFs do get printed for menus. Editing a PDF and uploading it to the site, integrating prices and syncing between the site, online ordering, PDF menus is just part of the business. There are lots of platforms that help with this such as Slice.

[parpfish]

Because they can make one nice pdf formatted to get printed out in the restaurant and then reuse it to display on the website

[pastel8739]

I vastly prefer looking at a PDF menu over an HTML one nearly all the time. PDFs are usually nicely formatted, and I don’t mind zooming and panning to see everything. HTML is frequently terribly formatted, interspersed with ads, slow, etc

[ErroneousBosh]

PDF is an enormous pain in the tits to view on a phone and has significant accessibility issues for people using assistive technologies.

It's not even about blind people. People with ADHD or dyslexia use assistive technology, which frequently makes an absolute horlicks of interpreting PDF. It's one of the reasons I'm trying to move a lot of documentation at work away from PDF and onto just straight HTML.

Plain old HTML, with thin CSS on it to make it not be black-and-white Times New Roman. Kicking it oldschool.

[nottorp]

> People with ADHD or dyslexia use assistive technology

Wait for 2 more iOS redesigns and everyone will use assistive technology on Apple devices :)

[victorbjorklund]

PDF:s are not great on mobile. And you can’t easily translate them (I often translate restaurant menus when they are on a website with just 2 clicks)

[AlotOfReading]

Translating anything that renders on my screen is the same two clicks to open an LLM with the screen contents. I expect that will become an increasingly universal experience as LLM features get shoved into every nook and cranny of tech.

[fullstacking]

To be fair this project uses zero 3rd party npm modules for runtime. The total runtime JS it uses is 1.76kB in size.

[Groxx]

It also works just fine without JavaScript, so I'm not sure what they're trying to do with that comment.

[dugmartin]

I agree. There are lots of free AstroJS themes for restaurants that generate static html that you can host somewhere like Firebase hosting for free.

- https://astro.build/themes/details/astropie/

- https://astro.build/themes/details/astrorante/

- https://astro.build/themes/details/tastyyy-restaurant-websit...

[burningChrome]

All of my static sites that I've built lately have been done on Netlify. Super easy to hook up to Github and the form handling is a breeze. I've known Mathias going back to when he was personally answering emails and promoting JAMSTACK so you can say I'm a bit biased. lol

Netlify is a great company that I'll always support.

[adzm]

I love Astro; there is so much you can do with it.

[bryanhogan]

I was going to recommend the same! Astro + Astro theme + an LLM will get you very far these days.

[DoctorOW]

What an exhausting solution to a made-up problem. This is exactly the kind of functionality JS was made to provide. There's a lot more JS in the PDF.js renderer modern browsers, and if you're not using a modern browser it likely wouldn't render at all. As others have pointed out, you're asking restaurants to throw away mobile traffic, screen readers, anyone not on a mainstream desktop browser to save ~20 lines of code in a programming language you don't like.

[glxxyz]

Remember during Covid where every restaurant's menu was a QR code on the table that linked to a PDF in S3?

[yieldcrv]

Remember how after Covid that didn't go away in tons of places

[foresto]

Covid ended?

[stronglikedan]

A PDF can't get the user halfway through the delivery process before seeing the soups.

[mvdtnz]

No one is browsing the internet without JS today (within margin of error). Whether or not this "should" be the case, it is.

[spartanatreyu]

This is the wrong way of looking at it.

Making a website's basic functionality work without JS isn't just for the random users who switch off their browser's JS runtime.

It's also for the people who have a random network dropout or slowdown on a random file (in this case a JS file).

[lmm]

From a business perspective you can go further: the people who are browsing the internet without JS are people who are going to cost you more to support than they'll ever bring you in revenue. Just like trying to support Linux gamers, excluding them is a net positive.

[pimlottc]

PDF is a terrible experience on mobile

[ThomasMidgley]

I wish restaurants would just make a homepage with menu _and_ opening hours.

In my area most restaurants have no website.

If they have a website it's often very hard to find their opening hours. Under 'contact'? Nope! At the footer? Nay! Maybe somewhere hidden in the menu PDF? With luck... Outside their homepage at google maps? Maybe. On their Tripadvisor page? Hahaha! Funny! Not.

[cess11]

The soup shows for me without JS.

[samdoesnothing]

Nobody should need a PDF renderer to see the soups.

Actually, nobody should need an XML parser to see the soups either.

[ChrisRR]

As an embdded engineer I'm always disappointed at how much processing power and RAM is needed just to display websites with just images and text. The vast majority of them do not need javascript

[fullstacking]

No one should need PDFs to see the soups when they can be handled perfectly fine with CSS scoped to print and save to PDF....

/s