Can't tell if this piece is genuine or not; ads taking up most of the space on the screen to the left and right; ads every 5 paragraphs; a video ad; constant moving of the article text as ads load.. ads popping in and out as I scroll... at least it's a great showcase of an unreadable article.
Surely we can acknowledge that JS is not the cause, just as HTTP is not the real cause of all those ads you see.
The problem is shortsighted business and design decisions that have prioritized squeezing every last fraction of a penny out of the page, borrowing against the user's perception of the site. In the long run, that debt is going to come due and the user is going to stop coming back to your site from lack of cost/benefit.
Well yes, JS is not the cause, but it's the tool that enables websites to invade their users privacy, eat their battery, and blink and slide and splash-screen ads from every angle. Before JS became so well suited for that task Flash was the main culprit. The web was better without a Flash plugin (and it still is).
Used "correctly" the web with JS is way better than the web without. There's plenty of sites that use JS great from actual apps to articles and tutorials with interactive examples. In fact personally I find myself disappointed when I see an article that would clearly be better with interactive diagrams but the authors are stuck thinking the web it just a transmitted book and not it's own medium but better strengths.
A couple of examples where IMO JS makes the page superior to one without
If you acknowledge that javascript is not the problem (as it is just an implementation detail), then I'm curious if you still agree with your comment above that is complaining about javascript?
I just have an adblocker. Don't know how much better it looks for you, but this one looks great over here and I don't get to be the guy in every other HN post complaining a site doesn't work with JS disabled.
It doesn't seem to me that JS by itself is the issue here.
And laughably the grey quote text that is intertwined throughout the article which is as illegible as the contrast that the author suggests of other applications.
> And laughably the grey quote text that is intertwined throughout the article which is as illegible as the contrast that the author suggests of other applications.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one bothered by that, especially after the author has just complained about reduced-contrast offset boxes.
For me it's well organized, as a single column of text breaking for occasional graphics. I saw no popup ads or modal screens at all. Standard mobile Safari here... maybe this illustrates the growing divide between desktop and mobile web design?
Yes, that's part of it. On desktop with ad blocker on, there is an awful lot of white space: http://imgur.com/jQV5fqy
There is less whitespace if you turn ad blocker off -- it turns out one of the things uBlock Origin is blocking is a social media widget on the left hand side. http://imgur.com/ip093TX
However, that ad in the middle of that screenshot pops in and out of what you are reading as was described by the OP. It's very annoying.
With adblocker on the whitespace is not optimal, but at least the user experience is not terrible.
