JavaScript

This woman is part of the problem of the current internet. There are only a few sites that make sense to only work with JS enabled and federated social media is NOT one of those. Wanna know why? Because all the JS bullshit is just to make shit "pretty". The data isn't - rather, should NOT - reside entirely in the JS.

EDIT - To make matters worse, the site in question is this - https://bestestmotherfucking.website/ ; which is "inspired" by Motherfucking Website and Better Fucking Website. I'm thinking this is just trolling and we fell for it

Got to disagree there. Websites should work without js. Sure it shouldn't have fancy animations or whatever but I should be able to read it.

I hate this cursed timeline where even finding out the opening hours of a restaurant needs to load half a dozen frameworks.

Nope. Fuck your site.

I remember when webservers served content, and didn't just pass me megabytes of bloated spaghetti and say "here, YOU run this."

So... there's a practical difference between rendering markup, which is handled by the browser engine and generally benign, and running executable script, which is frequently malicious.

Allowing your website to load JavaScript means that I'm allowing you to execute arbitrary code on my hardware. Hopefully the potential blast radius of any malicious code is limited by safety precautions in my web browser, but a web browser is not a security barrier and should not be relied on to protect the local system from malicious code downloaded from the Internet. The most pernicious and seemingly unavoidable behavior of JavaScript on most websites is device fingerprinting, and to get a better understanding of how much of a problem that is check out https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

The simplest step to prevent a lot of this malicious behavior is to block executable script. This is not really a new thing on the Internet, as extensions like NoScript have been around for 2 decades and have millions of users. This should be anticipated by the web developer as a completely normal use case.

Competent web developers understand that they have privacy-conscious users who block external executable script as a matter of course. Your website(s) should be designed to account for this, and should at least render and display information in a readable way without needing to execute your un-vetted code on the user's system. Maybe some dynamic functions of the website don't work, but that's OK as long as the majority of the site is accessible. A JavaScript-dependent website is no better than a Flash-dependent website, in terms of security, privacy, and professionalism.

NoScript frames this as a consent issue, and that's probably valid:

NoScript enables consensual browsing: your browser, your choice!

So if for any chance you can't use JS (outdated browser, outdated system, text-based browser, JS disabled by an admin, JS won't load, assistive technology) then... it's your fault?

JavaScript has been my favorite language for a decade. Still, I try to make websites server-rendered so that they can be read if my code fails to load or execute. For example, there are power outages in Ukrainian cities for most of the day because of the war. When there's no power, there's still 4G for a while but it switches to economic mode and slows down to a crawl. The websites of the monopolist energy company require a lot of JavaScript. It often fails to load for me during the outage. It's also not keyboard-accessible because of how its JS is implemented (I won't image I'd do better, they have a team while I'm a solo programmer, but I try and they don't). For me to see when there will be electricity at what place and plan where to go study and work, I have to rent a VPS, scrape their website and show me a static table that doesn't require JS to load. Some code to see what I mean: https://codeberg.org/nykula/powerup

There's a difference between a website and a web app. Websites indeed should not require JavaScript to function. Web apps are a different beast where, yes, disabling JavaScript means you are opting yourself out of being able to use the app.

Fuck this.

The state of the web, and software in general, is fucking abysmal. And it is in no small part due to this kind of shit. You want this recipe/news/whatever? Here is a hundred mbs of frameworks, trackers, spyware...

What's even the point nowadays when every website, sorry, 'wEb ApP' is going to make me install their crappy app to give me full functionality? Then the app is just a web view (when not a wrapped full fledged web browser) to present their shitty web but with more privileges.