Proposal: JS-required tag
12 points by ploum
12 points by ploum
Using a JS free browser as my daily driver, I often witness straight-text websites that require Javascript to display a few paragraphs of text.
I would like not to see them in my feed and filters those out.
I suggest a "JS-required" tag (in the format section) that could be added by moderators if forgotten and would allow a more pleasant experience.
I think this is going to be tricky to enforce - given the vast majority of submitters do use JavaScript, there's not really an easy way for us to notice that a page doesn't work without it. And I doubt moderators have the time to check every link with JS disabled either.
Ironically this would be a great task for an LLM agent. Load a webpage in lynx, determine if there is content, report a score.
But yeah, I had the same reflection. The people most likely to notice that this flag can be applied are the ones who want to filter it out.
But then, that’s a cooperative effort: the first one to notice saves it for other.
It may also raises awareness about that accessibility.
I think we all have things we'd prefer not to see in the feed — I find it uncomfortable to read white-on-black sites — but there is a point past which it’s unreasonable to expect others to cater to our wishes.
A cooperative system of annoyance tracking based on tag suggestions but orthogonal to content-based tags (so that JS/contrast complaints don't block adding the year to the title) does sound attractive…
The tags are used to categorise the "content" of the link, not the technologies used to serve it.
Except that they aren't, entirely. Many of the format tags skew more toward the technologies used to present the content.
Should there be an "https-required" tag for pages which refuse to be served over http? There are certainly times I would like to browse the web with devices and browsers that cannot handle https pages without a proxy, but the http-permitted world is very small and constantly shrinking. I'd imagine an affirmative tag like "https-required" would need to be applied to the overwhelming majority of submissions, making it impractical.
I suspect "js-required" would have a similar fate.
https-required would have the notable advantage of being easy to spot just by looking at the URL.
The js-required tag would be a big lift because:
I'd kind of like the idea of such a tag, but it seems impractical.
Disagreement over what constitutes "required"
It is quite simple: if the site explicitely refuses to give any content without JS. https://spamdforum.rf.gd/forum/index.php?id=488&i=1 https://www.vangemert.dev/blog/nothing
Also, there’s nothing at stakes. At worst, the contend is not tagged. There’s also no major annoyance for anybody except one more tag in the list.
Even your simple statement could be read two different ways: if the site explicitly refuses to give any content (IOW: they deny all content) without JS, or if there is any content that the site explicitly refuses to give without JS. These are different, but I could equally well argue that one requires JS or that both require JS.
You're certainly correct that nothing is at stake here. And the worst outcome is equal to the status quo: content is not tagged. The only possible harm is that developers of the site will spend effort trying to make a js-required tag useful and it will not be useful.
I was commenting on things that would make it hard for the tag to become useful in the way OP (edit: I see you are OP here!) wants. Not on harms the tag would bring; I don't think it would bring harms, only that it is unfortunately not likely to be useful the way OP wants in practice.
A very large majority of all text-content articles I navigate to from Lobste.rs are readable without JS either when fetched by a uniquely named user agent, or by a cheap plastic imitation of Chromium fetcher.
@ploum can you give rough numbers on how many recent submissions have been unusable without JavaScript in the user agent?
I have no idea as I don’t click on everything and I already filter a lot of tags. But I recently commented on: https://lobste.rs/s/7kmqgz/year_snake_with_plan_9
Today, I stumbled upon https://www.vangemert.dev/blog/nothing but I don’t know if it was through lobste.rs
Ironically, this would probably be best served by some kind of reporting/flagging mechanism, easy to implement in a small extension (kind of like Return Youtube Dislike).