It’s not because of the scrapers though. It’s probably because JavaScript is needed to make the page interactive in most cases. Almost everything is a single page web app now you can’t do that without JavaScript.
People could make old style sites where there is a full page reload every time you click a link but they aren’t as nice.
It’s not my taste. I am a software engineer and have to build these things. there are features you just can’t do with out JavaScript. Features that are expected from modern apps.
If you need a basic form you don’t need JavaScript but if you want to change anything on the page after it’s already loaded you do. That’s a huge limitation for any kind of app.
Without javascript, you can’t realistically do the “prove you are human bits”, which I seem to have to do many times a day this year.
Anubis did implement a ‘No-JS’ challenge, but it’s super trivial for scrapers to overcome. They just have to parse the refresh tag and retry after the specified interval. Not even ‘proof of work’, but increasingly the proof of work isn’t considered sufficient and many sites are back to the captcha family of bullshit.
I went to a Microsoft site to fill out a form to register for a 2 two conference. My CPU shot up to 100 percent. The task manager (in the browser) told me that this was using a huge amount of computer for a ton of javascript running on a page that didn’t need any at all.
It is very abused for analytics, little is used to make a page “nice” anymore.
Thank you for this invaluable insight, it was truly foolish of me to think that javascript is just silly and the entire webdev industry that’s based on it is just dummy dumb
It’s not because of the scrapers though. It’s probably because JavaScript is needed to make the page interactive in most cases. Almost everything is a single page web app now you can’t do that without JavaScript.
People could make old style sites where there is a full page reload every time you click a link but they aren’t as nice.
They arent as nice? You and I have very different tastes
It’s not my taste. I am a software engineer and have to build these things. there are features you just can’t do with out JavaScript. Features that are expected from modern apps.
If you need a basic form you don’t need JavaScript but if you want to change anything on the page after it’s already loaded you do. That’s a huge limitation for any kind of app.
It’s also because of the scrapers.
Without javascript, you can’t realistically do the “prove you are human bits”, which I seem to have to do many times a day this year.
Anubis did implement a ‘No-JS’ challenge, but it’s super trivial for scrapers to overcome. They just have to parse the refresh tag and retry after the specified interval. Not even ‘proof of work’, but increasingly the proof of work isn’t considered sufficient and many sites are back to the captcha family of bullshit.
I went to a Microsoft site to fill out a form to register for a 2 two conference. My CPU shot up to 100 percent. The task manager (in the browser) told me that this was using a huge amount of computer for a ton of javascript running on a page that didn’t need any at all.
It is very abused for analytics, little is used to make a page “nice” anymore.
Just because people use JavaScript for bad things doesn’t mean it’s not also necessary for the other things though
Thank you for this invaluable insight, it was truly foolish of me to think that javascript is just silly and the entire webdev industry that’s based on it is just dummy dumb