well, personally, i think your paranoia about javascript is overblown, but that's just me. my own site does have the ability to function without javascript, but only if the browser also has CSS turned off (the DHtml would render without javascript, but without the scripting to control the layers, the pages never change properly). however, for my site most pages have an alternative with the calendar/portal system.
when it comes to pop-ups (the biggest annoyance w/ javascript, obviously), there's always changing browsers, if the memory and machine requirements aren't too restrictive. MozillaFirebird 0.7 has the ability to tell javascript to not pop-up anything, then in the corner of the status bar is an icon that will highlight if javascript attempted to pop something up. you can double-click that icon and it'll bring up a dialog that will allow you to mark that site as pop-up safe, or just double-click the link that tried to navigate through a popup a second time and it'll do it "just this once".
however, mozilla is dog-slow on a 32 meg system, if that's how old a system you've got (like my laptop). it means that while mozilla's running, you can't really but running much else. and also have java and flash turned off 'cause turning them on causes page faults.
i actually have a much bigger problem with sites that live by flash exclusively than javascript navigation. i hate places that insist on popping up their own exclusive window to hang out in (in javascript, so you can't right-mouse-menu open it into a new tab), but i hate all-flash sites even more because being on a slow connection at home, downloading flash upgrades takes hours that i don't have or want to spend.
"well, personally, i think your paranoia about javascript is overblown, but that's just me."
My problems with Javascript are twofold: First the paranoia (more a decision to avoid "untrusted code" as much as possible, which isn't 100%, but I have to draw lines somewhere), which I worry about a lot more than most people, I admit. (Then again, a lot of people run Outlook with HTML previewing turned on, too.)
Second, I do a small but significant amount of my browsing in text browsers (Lynx and Links) -- when I'm closest to a text-screen (console on a Linux box where I don't want to start an X server just to look up one quick thing), when what I want to look up is just text anyhow (calendars/schedules, song lyrics, definitions, etc.) and don't want to wait for lots of decorations to load, or when I've got so many GUI browser windows open that I'm either losing track of stuff or just scared of running out of RAM so I fire up Lynx in my telnet window instead. I really shouldn't need Javascript or a GUI to look up text information.
As for popups, I've heard that some browsers are better than others at dealing with / stopping them, but hadn't bothered to look into which does what because popups went away for me as a side effect of turning off Javascript. (By the way, does anyone know how to tell Outlook to view email as HTML but not execute Javascript in email messages, while still allowing MSIE to execute Javascript on web pages? I know someone who has a problem with popups from spam, and I'd like to help her, but she wants Javascript in the browser.)
And as for old hardware, my NT machine has, I think, 80 MB RAM, and I'd like to be able to run Excel and/or Acrobat plus Exceed (X server) alongside my browser and telnet client. My 95 box does indeed have a mere 32 MB RAM. And other than my one "fast" (200MHz) Linux box, which I think has 16 or 32 MB, most of my Linux machines have about 8 MB each. Yes, I'm way behind the curve and I know it.
"i actually have a much bigger problem with sites that live by flash exclusively than javascript navigation."
I agree. There's no fucking excuse for those. Really. Even if a page's point is to show a cute cartoon, it shouldn't load as nothing more than a blank window when someone tries to visit it without Flash (or with Flash but without Javascript -- I've seen that, too).
By the way, how dangerous is Flash in terms of scripting and access to local filesystems? I've seen references to interaction between Flash and ActiveX, but will a Flash script's attempt to use ActiveX override my having ActiveX turned off in my browser configuration?
(no subject)
when it comes to pop-ups (the biggest annoyance w/ javascript, obviously), there's always changing browsers, if the memory and machine requirements aren't too restrictive. MozillaFirebird 0.7 has the ability to tell javascript to not pop-up anything, then in the corner of the status bar is an icon that will highlight if javascript attempted to pop something up. you can double-click that icon and it'll bring up a dialog that will allow you to mark that site as pop-up safe, or just double-click the link that tried to navigate through a popup a second time and it'll do it "just this once".
however, mozilla is dog-slow on a 32 meg system, if that's how old a system you've got (like my laptop). it means that while mozilla's running, you can't really but running much else. and also have java and flash turned off 'cause turning them on causes page faults.
i actually have a much bigger problem with sites that live by flash exclusively than javascript navigation. i hate places that insist on popping up their own exclusive window to hang out in (in javascript, so you can't right-mouse-menu open it into a new tab), but i hate all-flash sites even more because being on a slow connection at home, downloading flash upgrades takes hours that i don't have or want to spend.
(no subject)
My problems with Javascript are twofold: First the paranoia (more a decision to avoid "untrusted code" as much as possible, which isn't 100%, but I have to draw lines somewhere), which I worry about a lot more than most people, I admit. (Then again, a lot of people run Outlook with HTML previewing turned on, too.)
Second, I do a small but significant amount of my browsing in text browsers (Lynx and Links) -- when I'm closest to a text-screen (console on a Linux box where I don't want to start an X server just to look up one quick thing), when what I want to look up is just text anyhow (calendars/schedules, song lyrics, definitions, etc.) and don't want to wait for lots of decorations to load, or when I've got so many GUI browser windows open that I'm either losing track of stuff or just scared of running out of RAM so I fire up Lynx in my telnet window instead. I really shouldn't need Javascript or a GUI to look up text information.
As for popups, I've heard that some browsers are better than others at dealing with / stopping them, but hadn't bothered to look into which does what because popups went away for me as a side effect of turning off Javascript. (By the way, does anyone know how to tell Outlook to view email as HTML but not execute Javascript in email messages, while still allowing MSIE to execute Javascript on web pages? I know someone who has a problem with popups from spam, and I'd like to help her, but she wants Javascript in the browser.)
And as for old hardware, my NT machine has, I think, 80 MB RAM, and I'd like to be able to run Excel and/or Acrobat plus Exceed (X server) alongside my browser and telnet client. My 95 box does indeed have a mere 32 MB RAM. And other than my one "fast" (200MHz) Linux box, which I think has 16 or 32 MB, most of my Linux machines have about 8 MB each. Yes, I'm way behind the curve and I know it.
"i actually have a much bigger problem with sites that live by flash exclusively than javascript navigation."
I agree. There's no fucking excuse for those. Really. Even if a page's point is to show a cute cartoon, it shouldn't load as nothing more than a blank window when someone tries to visit it without Flash (or with Flash but without Javascript -- I've seen that, too).
By the way, how dangerous is Flash in terms of scripting and access to local filesystems? I've seen references to interaction between Flash and ActiveX, but will a Flash script's attempt to use ActiveX override my having ActiveX turned off in my browser configuration?