Christian Heilmann

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-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.

>If Free Software "fights for the users", then it needs to go to where the users are, and that's the web.

To what extent?

Just because a mass of users are somewhere, doesn't make that environment the right place for free software. But I'm not saying it's a wrong place. But it's not the only possible place. A popular environment might be by its nature unsuitable for free software, and free software developers would be mistaken to compromise their development by wholeheartedly embedding themselves on that platform.

What concerns me about the web:

- the trend has been a move toward centralisation, content silos

- DRM in the spec now (EME)

- bloated by necessity (as browsers need backward-compatibility)

- it's hacky, as a document-retrieval system retrofitted into an application platform

- people think it's beyond criticism, probably because of the notion that it's The One Open alternative to iOS/Android ...

(cf. https://www.christianheilmann.com/2016/10/05/can-we-stop-bad-mouthing-css-in-developer-talks-please/)

Despite all that, I still like the Web and want it to continue existing. And if I want a better system, I need to put my money where my mouth is and work on helping something else become a real practical alternative...

"I figure we're at the point on the web where Javascript et al would be expected in your browser,"

A browser cannot always recuperate when JavaScript fails to arrive - what should it do at that point? A recent example: the outage of googleapis.com CDN caused problems on many sites using JavaScript hosted there all because OpenDNS blacklisted the domain as a phishing domain.

* http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/010612_Thousands_of_Sites_Mislabeled_Phishers_After_OpenDNS_Blocks_Google_Hosted_Scripts

There are more reasons JavaScript indirectly failing in a browser:
http://christianheilmann.com/2011/12/06/that-javascript-not-available-case/

So generally, it makes sense for a site not to depend on JavaScript for a core basic experience.

Kinda adorable how people keep arguing back and forth, but fail to take notes on how the actual Moz employees act or think on it. And most of them think he is entitled to his beliefs and acts, and he should not be banished for it, even if they do not agree with him.

Please, try to learn this approach, pro-gay activists.

http://bholley.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/on-brendan-eich-and-the-thought-police/

https://staktrace.com/spout/entry.php?id=823

http://christianheilmann.com/2014/03/31/on-hating/

http://www.twobraids.com/2014/03/the-mozilla-ceo.html

http://patrickfinch.com/2014/03/31/the-most-important-decisions-we-make/

https://ozten.com/psto/2014/03/28/pick-your-battles/