• web reading without javascript

    From Ivan Shmakov@21:1/5 to All on Sun Nov 5 08:40:17 2023
    XPost: comp.misc

    On 2023-10-29, Spiros Bousbouras wrote:
    On 28 Oct 2023 22:33:36 -0000 (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

    [Cross-posting to news:comp.infosystems.www.misc .]

    I have never encountered this or found it to be a problem with a
    browser, seeing that most sites today seem to require javascript
    and cookies for any function at all anyway.

    I can search Google, amazon, read IMDB and many other sites just
    using w3m (and with no cookies).

    I'm using Lynx as my primary web user agent for two decades
    now, and I don't have any trouble finding readable websites.

    When uMatrix was in Debian, I've used it whenever I needed to
    use Chromium. Aside of things like eshops or my bank's web
    interface, I don't recall it's been /necessary/ to enable
    Javascript for most of the websites I read to function.

    For eshops et al. that use Javascript to show their catalog,
    the workaround I'm using is to: a. use in-browser debugging
    facilities to figure out which URI they query (typically with
    XMLHttpRequest) for data; b. query that URI with curl(1)
    instead. The results can then be made presentable with Sed
    / Awk / Perl / whatever.

    Consider, e. g. (a somewhat artifical example: this data is
    accessible with Lynx as it is):

    $ curl -skim23 -- https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php\ "?format=xml&action=query&prop=coordinates|info|linkshere|revisions\ &rvprop=ids|timestamp|comment|user|sha1&list=usercontribs&uclimit=max&"\ ucuser=Ivan_Shmakov >| "$(mktemp -- /tmp/mycontribs.XXXXX)"
    $ sh -Ceuc 'for f ; do printf \\n%s\\n\\n "*** ${f##*/}" ;
    < "$f" sed -e "s/><\\</>\\n</g;" ; done ; ' dummy.sh /tmp/mycontribs.YP3Mu

    *** mycontribs.YP3Mu

    HTTP/1.1 200 OK^M
    date: Sun, 05 Nov 2023 08:27:55 GMT^M
    ...
    <usercontribs>
    <item userid="504787" user="Ivan Shmakov" pageid="136088160" revid="794224162" parentid="793976029" ns="6" title="File:Chebyshev type I order 3 bandstop filter 2023 228 1.gif" timestamp="2023-08-18T18:07:18Z" comment="Fixed markup, as well as the {{CC0}} licensing template invocation." size="7529" />
    <item userid="504787" user="Ivan Shmakov" pageid="136088475" revid="794220990" parentid="793910161" ns="6" title="File:Chebyshev type I order 3 bandstop filter 2023 228 2.gif" timestamp="2023-08-18T17:55:41Z" top="" comment="Fixed markup." size="9295" />
    ...

    If I expect that a website has mostly text based content but
    requires javascript to read it, I assume that it's poorly designed
    and I need not bother.

    +1. If a website requires Javascript (or flash, DRM, etc.),
    I'm likely not its target audience anyway.

    The only real annoyance is not being able to read comments under
    youtube videos without javascript. On the vast majority of occasions
    I choose not to read the comments.

    Invidious instances offer an option to read Youtube comments
    without Javascript. Consider, e. g.:

    http://yewtu.be/watch?v=fs0N2f9VHjI
    http://yewtu.be/watch?v=fs0N2f9VHjI&nojs=1

    Then again, while I have no doubt there's a wealth of useful
    information in Youtube comments, I know of no easy procedure
    for actually /finding/ it among all the noise; so most of the
    time, I don't bother, either.

    But of course cloudflare often breaks wget which is an issue.

    It also prevents access from w3m and you don't even get an
    informative message. But if I'm really interested in the content,
    it often is available through Google cache.

    I'm using the Wayback Machine for that purpose. E. g.:

    http://rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7489.txt -> cloudfailure, http://web.archive.org/web/2023/http://rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7489.txt
    readable version.

    (Though in this specific case I actually prefer
    rsync://ftp.rfc-editor.org/rfcs/ anyway.)

    --
    FSF associate member #7257 np. Somewhere Somehow by Broken Poets

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