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2018-03-14
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ast night on mastodon...
ser Are0h[0] posted in a rather tongue-in-cheek manner:
I'm gonna be honest. These 'turn off JavaScript, no css' cats get
on my last nerve.
The web is a beautiful platform that has allowed us a fantastic
medium to share and express data.
There a places that abuse this privilege, but everyone has the
freedom to choose not support places that do.
Wanting to reduce the web to a text renderer because one doesn't
like a handful of sites is ridiculous and childish.
If you just want text, go read a book. Enough already.
t is hard to understand due to the conflation of several distinct
hings. First of all there's 'the web'. A conglomerate of separate
ervers that serve documents and provide backchannels.
n another development thread, people misued the semantical markup of
TML for typesetting and layout purposes (tables anyone?). That has
een countered by yet another layer of indirection, namely CSS.
n top of these documents on some of these servers whole applications
ave been written, running partly on the server but more and more on
he client side of the connection.
his is done via Javascript mostly these days (used to be Java then
lash, now JS...). The javascript used to be, well, just scripts.
iny little add ons on your document to be somewhat helpful for the
ser (validating input up front, catching some kind of commands from
he browser, etc.) At this point in time the document still was the
entral piece.
ast forward a view years.
ow there are a lot of sites that will hand the client an almost
mpty document and requires JS code to be run which in turn creates
he document on the fly. This makes the client now an arbitrary code
xecutor that downloads and executes code and does the UI part of the
rogram.
part from the obvious security impact of running arbitrary code from
ny source, there are additional downsides: Most sites don't host the
ode parts themselves. Instead they just point to 3rd party places
nd tell the client to download this snipped of code here and there
o build the desired program. Mostly speed is the argument for this
ragmentation of code.
ntering Ads. Advertisement has been the major player in monetarising
he web pages. In the past there have been pictures with links to the
dvertiser that have been embedded in some part of the webpage. Now
hose ads themselves depend on their own army of javascript code...
hose are typically hosted on ad networks and the original owner of a
ite has usually little to no influence on the type of ad shown on
he page.
ll of this complexity has its cost. Webbrowsers have bugs,
ontaining a code execution environment and preventing it from
ccessing arbitrary code is hard. Also just the mere possibility to
end data to arbitrary sources might pose a risk to some users and
ill harm their anonymity.
o I do think, that there are legitimate reasons to switch off
avascript by default. And there are websites that still function
roperly without javascript. Amazon still works without JS, ebay has
een working without JS but stopped to lately. And I guess a lot of
ites will just assume javascript to be available.
y guess is that in Are0h's world there are no documents to be served
nymore. Everything is just an application written for a execution
nvironment called a browser for historical reasons.
nd yes, I prefer the document view of things. For a lot of these so
alled web applications I don't need an application at all. I want to
ccess information in a uniform manner. And if I am using a funny
evice I want to select CSS as I please as well, yes. A lot of CSS is
ard to read, hard to read in a dark setting, I prefer using my own
onts, thanks and I don't want to be tracked and abused by ads and
ther analytics software.
o I don't want to turn 'the web' into a text renderer. I want it to
erve meaningful documents and not serving software. And it is not
ust because of a couple of misbehaving website, it is because of the
ajority of players don't serve my interests and don't respect my
rivacy.
o I guess I'll go and fetch my books now...
__References________________________________________________________
0]: https://playvicious.social/@Are0h/99678576709515025
