"grauzone" <none@example.net> wrote in message news:gvbr5u$1671$1@digitalmars.com...
>> browsers. What's the big deal everyone have with Javascript?
>
> It's unnecessary, annoying, slower, and adds security holes.
>
> When using Firefox, I usually use NoScript to block all scripts by default. Sometimes, some minor things don't work, and I have to enable JS. Now it's really rare to see functionality that couldn't be provided without JS. Rather, web designers seem to be really dumb and do stuff like replacing real links by script functions. As a prime example take YouTube. It's like YouTube doesn't believe in a life without AJAX! The simplest things don't work anymore. What for?
>
> About AJAX, you know it breaks the back button and all other sorts of practical things you are used from normal web browsing. And occasionally, they use it for animations. Animations what for? They only introduce artificial GUI latency. (You know, Win 3.11 feels faster.) A related example for annoying AJAX things are those "applet" like boxes, that contain a "loading" gif, and apparently loads a HTML subtree using AJAX.
>
> For completely over-engineered AJAX waste look at the Tango docs on dsource. I mean, it emulates frames, and the end result is worse than with good old frames! Ah yes, we all know frames are "outdated", but AJAX is hip and new! Let's emulate frames, because we feel it's too slow to reload the whole page again! (Now now, I wonder if the Tango docs even require a webserver. Maybe that's the reason why there's no downloadable documentation? But maybe I'm blaming the wrong thing here.)
>
> They told use not to use <blink> or <marquee>? OK, we'll just use JS!
>
> Among the best uses of JS I've seen are snow flakes moved by a script.
>
> /rant (I feel better now.)

Yes, yes, yes. This. All of it.

To add a little though, grauzone says "You know, Win 3.11 feels faster." My 486 Win 3.11 machine *was* faster (not in terms of raw operations per second of course, but in terms of responsiveness.) My machine has a clockspeed in the GHz range, RAM in the GB range, and basic text entry in my browser frequently lags by at least a second. WTF? My 486/Win3.11 machine never did that! Hell, my Apple IIc never did that.

About 5-10 years ago, it was common, standard practice to design web pages so that they didn't take any more than about a couple seconds to load. But now, most of the pages on the web easily take about 5-10 seconds or more, and nobody seems to give a shit. In fact, I just timed how long it takes to load the main page of Tango's 0.9.9.8 API docs: it took a full 19 seconds. I timed it again with JS disabled: 2 seconds. I don't see how anyone can consider anything remotely that bad to be at all acceptable, particularly considering that the JS version does absolutely nothing that can't be reasonably done without JS (except for the folding/unfolding of the tree nodes, but you know, whoop-dee-f&^%ing-doo. I'm pretty sure I can live without that).

And then there's those modal in-page popups... You know, there was a time when people were aware that popups were bad. But hell, make them modal (ie, cause them to render the underlying page completely unresponsive) and stick them inside the page, and all of a sudden they're great! (/sarcasm, of course).

DHTML and Flash *are* the new blinks/marquees/animating-GIFs/embedded-sounds, but with two additional drawbacks: 1. There's no longer anyone on the web intelligent enough to recognize the *exact same* obnoxiousness problems that led to the downfall of the those 90's-web abominations, and 2. They're orders of magnitude slower (and don't get me started on Chrome or Opera). Sure, unlike the old 90's-web abominations, they do have a *few* good uses. But that in absolutely no way excuses the bad stuff. And, (and here's the real clincher), since I obviously can't enforce proper design on the web, the one thing I *can* do is just simply disable that shit. So I do. And as you can already tell, I'm far from the only one.

"Nick Sabalausky" <a@a.a> wrote in message news:gvc4kc$29bd$1@digitalmars.com...
> And, (and here's the real clincher), since I obviously can't enforce proper design on the web, the one thing I *can* do is just simply disable that shit. So I do. And as you can already tell, I'm far from the only one.
>

Oh, yea, and *I'm* the one who catches flack for that, instead of the people that are actually making those garbage designs in the first place, just because *I'm* not complacent enough to roll over and take it like all the rest of the good little drones.

Which of course lead me to another thing...this modern society of "anyone who complains about anything is just simply being a problem", *grumble* *grumble*...

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Nick Sabalausky" <a@a.a> wrote in message news:gvc4kc$29bd$1@digitalmars.com...
>> And, (and here's the real clincher), since I obviously can't enforce proper design on the web, the one thing I *can* do is just simply disable that shit. So I do. And as you can already tell, I'm far from the only one.
>>
> 
> Oh, yea, and *I'm* the one who catches flack for that, instead of the people that are actually making those garbage designs in the first place, just because *I'm* not complacent enough to roll over and take it like all the rest of the good little drones.
> 
> Which of course lead me to another thing...this modern society of "anyone who complains about anything is just simply being a problem", *grumble* *grumble*...
> 
	FWIW I completely agree...

		Jerome
-- 
mailto:jeberger@free.fr
http://jeberger.free.fr
Jabber: jeberger@jabber.fr

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Nick Sabalausky" <a@a.a> wrote in message news:gvc4kc$29bd$1@digitalmars.com...
>> And, (and here's the real clincher), since I obviously can't enforce proper design on the web, the one thing I *can* do is just simply disable that shit. So I do. And as you can already tell, I'm far from the only one.

Definitely not. That led to the creation of Firefox extensions like NoScript. NoScript is one of the most popular extensions, along Adblock and (like I just found out) Video DownloadHelper to download videos from sites like YouTube.

> Oh, yea, and *I'm* the one who catches flack for that, instead of the people that are actually making those garbage designs in the first place, just because *I'm* not complacent enough to roll over and take it like all the rest of the good little drones.

I guess many designers aren't really aware about how annoying those additional features are. They get obsessed over what is possible, and do stuff because they can. They should learn why there's this proverb "less is more"!

> Which of course lead me to another thing...this modern society of "anyone who complains about anything is just simply being a problem", *grumble* *grumble*...

*grumble* *grumble*

Hello Nick,

> Yes, yes, yes. This. All of it.
[...]

Anything that can be used for good can be used for ill. Yes, lots of sites out there are junk, but that would be true no matter what tools were available.

The (long term) solution isn't to reject the tools but to figure out how to make them (or there replacements) easy enough to use correctly and hard enough to use incorrectly that people don't abuse them through ignorance.

On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 2:43 PM, Nick Sabalausky <a@a.a> wrote:
>
> To add a little though, grauzone says "You know, Win 3.11 feels faster." My 486 Win 3.11 machine *was* faster (not in terms of raw operations per second of course, but in terms of responsiveness.) My machine has a clockspeed in the GHz range, RAM in the GB range, and basic text entry in my browser frequently lags by at least a second. WTF? My 486/Win3.11 machine never did that! Hell, my Apple IIc never did that.
>
> About 5-10 years ago, it was common, standard practice to design web pages so that they didn't take any more than about a couple seconds to load. But now, most of the pages on the web easily take about 5-10 seconds or more, and nobody seems to give a shit. In fact, I just timed how long it takes to load the main page of Tango's 0.9.9.8 API docs: it took a full 19 seconds. I timed it again with JS disabled: 2 seconds. I don't see how anyone can consider anything remotely that bad to be at all acceptable, particularly considering that the JS version does absolutely nothing that can't be reasonably done without JS (except for the folding/unfolding of the tree nodes, but you know, whoop-dee-f&^%ing-doo. I'm pretty sure I can live without that).

I'm starting to get the impression that you just have a _really slow Javascript interpreter_ in your browser.  I have no idea what you're talking about with text input lag.  I have never experienced that. And the Tango API opens in about 2 seconds with JS enabled for me.

What browser are you *using*?

> I'm starting to get the impression that you just have a _really slow Javascript interpreter_ in your browser.  I have no idea what you're talking about with text input lag.  I have never experienced that. And the Tango API opens in about 2 seconds with JS enabled for me.
>
> What browser are you *using*?

I have the same problem with the tango website an sich.
Goint to http://www.dsource.org/projects/ gives me a 5 to 10 second lag
between showing 'loading projects' and actually showing them.
Latest FF
The tango website is the slowest website I know, so I think it is an
exceptionally bad example for showing js being slow as I know a lot of
websites which use loads more of web 2.o stuff and show up in less than a
second.

"grauzone" <none@example.net> wrote in message news:gvc6r3$2dmi$1@digitalmars.com...
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "Nick Sabalausky" <a@a.a> wrote in message news:gvc4kc$29bd$1@digitalmars.com...
>>> And, (and here's the real clincher), since I obviously can't enforce proper design on the web, the one thing I *can* do is just simply disable that shit. So I do. And as you can already tell, I'm far from the only one.
>
> Definitely not. That led to the creation of Firefox extensions like NoScript. NoScript is one of the most popular extensions, along Adblock and (like I just found out) Video DownloadHelper to download videos from sites like YouTube.
>

Adblock is essential. Most ads have gotten so completely out-of-hand, I seriously wouldn't even be using the web anymore if it weren't for Adblock.

I've been meaning to try NoScript. Currently, I'm using QuickJava, which places a *very* convenient toggle button on the status bar that let's you turn JS on/off. But I've found there are some sites/pages where I need it to be off, and others I need it on, and QuickJava doesn't have a way of saving the settings on a site-by-site or page-by-page basis. So I'm constantly loading a particular page the wrong way. For instance, about half the time that I go to the Tango docs, I forget to turn JS off, and just because of that I have to wait nearly half a minute before I can correct the mistake or even switch to another tab (Why the stop button doesn't work on JS-processing is beyond me...).

IIRC, I think NoScript does let you do site-by-site, right? I just hope it plays nice with QuickJava though, (or contains QuickJava-style functionality), because trying to configure sites/pages manually would be a major PITA and possibly not even be worth it.

And then there's FlashBlock, which I *would* absolutely love...except it *only* works with JS enabled!!! ^&$&^%^^&!!! And frankly, I just don't have the time to dig into FF extension-writing and do things the way I really want them.

But of course, these are all just clumbsy symptom-attacking hacks anyway, not real solutions. Plus there's the issue that the more extentions you're using, the slower FF gets... So at best you're just fixing one problem at the cost of another.

>> Yes, yes, yes. This. All of it.
> [...]
>
> Anything that can be used for good can be used for ill. Yes, lots of sites out there are junk, but that would be true no matter what tools were available.
>
> The (long term) solution isn't to reject the tools but to figure out how to make them (or there replacements) easy enough to use correctly and hard enough to use incorrectly that people don't abuse them through ignorance.
>

I like how you can select the transcript text on TED's videos.

"BCS" <none@anon.com> wrote in message news:a6268ff641a8cbaa855554eb0c@news.digitalmars.com...
> Hello Nick,
>
>> Yes, yes, yes. This. All of it.
> [...]
>
> Anything that can be used for good can be used for ill. Yes, lots of sites out there are junk, but that would be true no matter what tools were available.
>
> The (long term) solution isn't to reject the tools but to figure out how to make them (or there replacements) easy enough to use correctly and hard enough to use incorrectly that people don't abuse them through ignorance.
>

Although I may often say things to the contrary, I don't actually advocate the outright elimination of JS or Flash world-wide (hell, I've even used them myself *where appropriate*).

But, the problem is, *most* of the uses of JS and Flash that are out there fall into the "bad" category. And because of that, I find that the tiny handful of good uses are just not enough to justify me keeping them enabled in my browser. And that *would* be perfectly fine, but literally about half of the web is broken/inaccessible when you have JS and Flash disabled, despite there being absolutely no good reason for that. And *that* is my real main complaint.