Sitepoint works great: no ads. I also don’t have to hunt for options when posting: they are all there. And clicking on someone’s name brings me to their profile page, which lists all their sections… I notice when using my “lets-everything-in” browser (Chrome), posting is harder, profiles brings a retarded list up, and then user pages have all the info hidden in tabs.
CSSCreator also doesn’t need Javascript. Everything must go through the server anyway, so JS can only enhance that somehow. Front-end client scripting cannot and should not replace back-end programming and validation. You cannot trust the client, the client is always untrustworthy and tainted.
(I recently filled out a form which, looking at the source code, uses Javascript to validate the fields. Haha. I filled it in through my server, meaning in Lynx, meaning no Javascript. I was very tempted to write “j4v45cr1ptv4l1d4t10n” for my mobile phone number just for the lawlz, since it would have been sent, but it was for a job solicitation so I didn’t)
Amazon.com works great. In fact this is why I’ll order stuff from Amazon instead of some other, local stores (that and the local stores often want to force me to make an account with a password just so I can buy some cheap Logitech mouse… hello, goodbye). With Amazon, you have no idea you’re missing something.
eBay, I have no idea. Never been there.
LinkedIn is terrible when using the keyboard in a graphical browser (this has nothing to do with Javascript: no :focus styles), but when I am reading my mail (I ssh over to the server where I use the mutt client to read my mail) when there’s a notice from LinkedIn and a link for me to click, the default browser there is Elinks (which I don’t like as much as Lynx, but whatever, it works). I seem to be able to do everything. They could use some skip links so I tab less, but whatever.
In fact I do quite a bit of browsing with Lynx or Elinks over ssh. Sitepoint is fairly easy to use with those, except there’s no way to tell a quote from regular text, which sucks. It’s not in the content, but they seem to rely purely on styles. So you get
Quote:
some text
and more text
and more text
where does the quote end
and the reply begin?
you don’t know
have to guess.
Sites that I use that don’t work without JS:
Twitter (but EasyChirp, formerly AccessibleTwitter, can work without it, though misses some things… and they supposedly have a low or no-JS version on their mobile version)
Slideshare (duh)
Youtube (you’d think this was duh but I’m not talking about the videos…) no comments visible without Javascript? Can’t log out without Javascript, but you can log in? What kind of idiocy is that? They may have fixed that recently, who knows… I refuse to let Google link my old YouTube account with an email they happen to have associated with me. I will not link, so no more logging into YouTube for me I guess. Too bad
Flickr seems to kinda work but I don’t do much with it except view someone’s linked photos or browse their galleries
My bank: absolutely nothing works, and in fact I can’t even just turn scripts on… they seem to want to do indecent things with my browser so I use the lets-everything-in browser for banking. Yup, they rely on Javascript, the least secure thing you could possibly rely on. I don’t feel too safe banking online, lawlz.
DeviantArt can’t wipe its own butt without Javascript enabled. It also stores the art across a heap of servers, and they seem to call each other with Javascript for some reason. The menu doesn’t work (well).
Blocking Javascript speeds up the loading of fat-lady-on-the-beach web sites that seem to spend an inordinate amount of time calling other servers like facebook’s or some weather site’s just to load a bunch of unasked-for widgets and junk. Like, with JS on, in Chrome, I’ll be sitting waiting like 30 seconds for a page to load, when all I’m waiting for is someone to get a 200OK for some goofy “read about us on Facebook” iframe. Christ, if I want to connect to facebook I’ll go there myself. And so anytime the weather widget (wow, great, it’s telling me what the weather is… so does my window!) is sitting there trying to load, it’s wasting my time.
Anytime some bloataceous script is loading to round box corners and make a slow retarded fade-in/fade-out on stuff I’m trying to click on, I want it blocked. I didn’t go to that site to ooh and aah over a 15-second fade-with-music freaking dropdown menu, did I?
I recently found a list of article summaries about stuff like research on Agile design, XP and whatnot… there were a few usability links. One study of 300 people had them use an original site, and another group visited another version of it which had more graphical decorations, fancier menus and a bit more art.
The participants all viewed the prettier site more favourably than the plainer functional site. They even said they thought it was easier to use. However it turned out they took longer to do tasks, did more tasks wrong, and mis-read statements on the site more with the prettier one. I thought that was funny, because how a user feels about their success on a website is almost as important as how much success they actually had… so kinda sad to see people were basically tricked into thinking they did better when they did worse.
So I’m aware that people who get pretty shiny effects tend to think well of those things, ask for those things, and want those things. Maybe I’m aware of why I’m on a site (and maybe that’s because I’m a web developer?), so I’m more conscious of get-in get-out get-done. Anything that slows me down or breaks my flow earns my scorn. Grandma, though… prolly thinks it’s fine. And she’s not going to turn off Javascript for anything.
Nor do I expect her to or think she should. But if she doesn’t have it for some reason, she’d damn well better be able to use my site, and if she’s never been there before, she should never know the difference.