• 5 Posts
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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: April 2nd, 2025

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  • Let’s be careful how we phrase things here. JavaScript form submission and navigation are choices, not needs.

    Also, progressive enhancement / graceful degradation exists. When competent developers (or their bosses) want script effects on our sites, we can include them and make the sites continue to function with scripts disabled. It might require more work, but it is absolutely possible.

    Framing the script-based approaches to these things as if they were needs contributes to the problem, IMHO.

    (I am referring to the vast majority of web sites, of course, not special-purpose web applications like games.)


  • who@feddit.orgtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlBrowsers are complicit in browser fingerprinting.
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    20 hours ago

    Web developers are complicit in browser fingerprinting, by insisting that sites require JavaScript (or WASM).

    All of us are complicit in browser fingerprinting, because we tolerate this script dependence.

    IMHO, a web site being allowed to execute arbitrary code on visitors’ hardware should be an anomaly. The vast majority of them could be built to deliver the same information without requiring that inherently dangerous permission.









  • Last I checked, archive.org usually didn’t work when articles are paywalled. Has that changed?

    In my experience, it depends on when the snapshot is made. If made early enough that the paywall was not yet in place (probably because publishers want their articles to be indexed by search engines) then it will not have the paywall.

    One nice thing about archive.org’s mirroring is that they list all their snapshots of a page by date and time, so if the latest one contains a paywall, you can sometimes go back to the first one and find it with no paywall.



  • If I wanted to do this, I think I would start by getting to know the IT staff. This would:

    • Help me to understand the challenges they face in getting their work done: what’s problematic for them, what’s helpful, what skills they already have, etc. This would eventually guide me in how to approach suggesting changes with minimal friction.
    • Make me a familiar person to them, and allow opportunities to build trust in my skills, knowledge, and judgment. If this is established before I ever suggest a change, it could avoid some of the doubt and resistance that would surely come if a stranger walked up and pushed for changes. I want to be a friend, not a foe.
    • Potentially identify an ally within IT: Someone who might already want to make the switch (perhaps because they’re tired of Microsoft’s BS) or at least agree that it would make sense. An ally on the inside would not only make it easier to get others to seriously consider the change, but also potentially help gather information about how MS Office is currently being used so that I could prepare equivalent LibreOffice workflows for users who need them.

    I suggest taking your time, and saving Linux for later so that it doesn’t create more friction against moving to LibreOffice.





  • Current web browser engines generally support JavaScript and WebAssembly, and no others (unless via a plugin, as with Java).

    So, if I understand you correctly, your options are to find a language that transpiles down to one of those two (several such languages exist), or find an engine that isn’t precisely a web engine but supports some alternative language(s). I don’t know any useful examples of the latter, but perhaps someone else will chime in with something like that.