
Js;dr = JavaScript Required; Didn’t Read - franze
http://tantek.com/2015/069/t1/js-dr-javascript-required-dead
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getdavidhiggins
Not everyone surfs the web with Lynx. Whilst I understand the need for
websites to stand the test of time and be "curlable", there are still many
'appy' websites out there that fall back to plain HTML when we need it. I'm a
big fan of archival services like Pinboard which I have been running now for
3-4 years under an archival account ― it has terabytes of raw HTML data that I
can peruse at any time and do a full text search for any page. The bulk of
those pages are very JS dense pages that somehow, through some wizardry on the
site's backend; have managed to preserve some text for me to read. GoogleBot
struggled with this not so long ago, but can now crawl fragmented URIs with a
hashbang in them, as if the page was a normal HTML page. I suspect GoogleBot
is a stripped down Chrome that renders the page and does a scrape. Infact
GoogleBot has been proven to execute JS. SEO and search aside, there is
(hopefully) some server black magic that detects browsers like Lynx and then
serves us some 'neckbeard text'. Webapps which are not doing that are probably
not worth your time anyway.Also noteworthy:

[http://christianheilmann.com/2011/12/06/that-javascript-
not-...](http://christianheilmann.com/2011/12/06/that-javascript-not-
available-case/)

Also, there are great proposals by the W3C to get webapps working without the
need for JS. A lot of the behavior you see now in webapps could be done with
simple HTML tags.

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kazinator
It's not just Lynx users. I surf the web with NoScript (a FireFox extension to
block java script on a per-domain basis, the sake of security). That also
enforces "js; dr". Some pages show absolutely _no_ content unless you allow JS
from their domain, and perhaps others. I often don't bother; just back button
out of there and go somewhere else.

~~~
getdavidhiggins
Yeah but adblockers, noscript, and other privacy plugins break the web. As
such, they are not a magic bullet. Many of these plugins are well intentioned,
but only address the problem at a surface level. I like to surf the web with
no addons. By "surf" I mean properly surf and having hundreds of tabs open. I
want to see a page the way the site author intended it to be, untainted by
plugins. A lot of the privacy issues you see in browsers are fingerprinting
issues related to useragent strings, cookies, and IPsec (or lack thereof).
This is trivial to address with VMs, VPNs, and private sessions.

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theandrewbailey
Thanks. I'll be sure to post this for websites that won't show anything with
NoScript on.

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k1dbl4ck
ironic since the language used to retrieve this immortal data you speak of,
will be javascript

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getdavidhiggins
follow up: [http://blog.higg.im/2015/03/22/the-futility-of-building-
full...](http://blog.higg.im/2015/03/22/the-futility-of-building-full-js-
websites/)

