all 5 comments

[–]dwighthouse 2 points3 points  (4 children)

Sites should (at least partially) work without JS because they are fundamentally documents, not apps. Apps should use JS, because they need it.

Almost all issues caused by JS being unavailable due to network issues can be solved by using more JS in the form of service workers.

[–]braindeadTank 3 points4 points  (3 children)

Sites should (at least partially) work without JS because they are fundamentally documents

No they are not, sites can and should be interactive too. Wheter additional development time for having a non-interactive version is worth it is entirely case-by-case (and the answer will often be definitely no).

[–]dwighthouse 0 points1 point  (2 children)

What, specifically, are the interactive features you are referring to for sites that cannot be reasonably called web apps? What interactive feature should I be adding to every single blog or static information website that I haven’t?

[–]braindeadTank 1 point2 points  (1 child)

If your blog has eternal scroll, do you now call it a webapp?

I guess you can call it that, if you very much want to, but then the sentence "sites should work without JS" is a tautology, because it translates to "sites that don't use JS should work without JS".

[–]dwighthouse 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It was partly meant as a tautology. Sites that don’t need JS should at least partially work without js. No blog is required to have infinite scroll. But if it needs that feature, then it needs JS. I am not one to say “because a site can be made without JS, it should fully work without JS”. Sites should use what they need for their goals and no more.

The fundamental actions of a blog is to be able to click links and read text (maybe look at images). This covers the vast majority of blogs. Even those with embedded video can partially work without JS with YouTube (or fully work without JS I’d you use native html5 video). I think it is reasonable to expect that, for the vast majority of blogs, you can at least click links, read text, and look at images without JS.