2018-03-14
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Last night on mastodon...

User 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.

It is hard to understand due to the conflation of several distinct
things. First of all there's 'the web'. A conglomerate of separate
servers that serve documents and provide backchannels.

On another development thread, people misued the semantical markup of
HTML for typesetting and layout purposes (tables anyone?). That has
been countered by yet another layer of indirection, namely CSS.

On top of these documents on some of these servers whole applications
have been written, running partly on the server but more and more on
the client side of the connection.

This is done via Javascript mostly these days (used to be Java then
Flash, now JS...). The javascript used to be, well, just scripts.
Tiny little add ons on your document to be somewhat helpful for the
user (validating input up front, catching some kind of commands from
the browser, etc.) At this point in time the document still was the
central piece.

Fast forward a view years.

Now there are a lot of sites that will hand the client an almost
empty document and requires JS code to be run which in turn creates
the document on the fly. This makes the client now an arbitrary code
executor that downloads and executes code and does the UI part of the
program.

Apart from the obvious security impact of running arbitrary code from
any source, there are additional downsides: Most sites don't host the
code parts themselves. Instead they just point to 3rd party places
and tell the client to download this snipped of code here and there
to build the desired program. Mostly speed is the argument for this
fragmentation of code.

Entering Ads. Advertisement has been the major player in monetarising
the web pages. In the past there have been pictures with links to the
advertiser that have been embedded in some part of the webpage. Now
those ads themselves depend on their own army of javascript code...
Those are typically hosted on ad networks and the original owner of a
site has usually little to no influence on the type of ad shown on
the page.

All of this complexity has its cost. Webbrowsers have bugs,
containing a code execution environment and preventing it from
accessing arbitrary code is hard. Also just the mere possibility to
send data to arbitrary sources might pose a risk to some users and
will harm their anonymity.

So I do think, that there are legitimate reasons to switch off
javascript by default. And there are websites that still function
properly without javascript. Amazon still works without JS, ebay has
been working without JS but stopped to lately. And I guess a lot of
sites will just assume javascript to be available.

My guess is that in Are0h's world there are no documents to be served
anymore. Everything is just an application written for a execution
environment called a browser for historical reasons.

And yes, I prefer the document view of things. For a lot of these so
called web applications I don't need an application at all. I want to
access information in a uniform manner. And if I am using a funny
device I want to select CSS as I please as well, yes. A lot of CSS is
hard to read, hard to read in a dark setting, I prefer using my own
fonts, thanks and I don't want to be tracked and abused by ads and
other analytics software.

So I don't want to turn 'the web' into a text renderer. I want it to
serve meaningful documents and not serving software.  And it is not
just because of a couple of misbehaving website, it is because of the
majority of players don't serve my interests and don't respect my
privacy.

So I guess I'll go and fetch my books now...

___References________________________________________________________

[0]: https://playvicious.social/@Are0h/99678576709515025

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