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Topic: What's wrong with Blogspot.com? (web standards) (Read 3917 times)

What's wrong with Blogspot.com? (web standards)

Take a look http://judecnelson.blogspot.com/

The page loads, but does not display for me in Elinks (no JS) and Seamonkey (maybe adblocking too much). The source code is full of links to scripts rather than textual content. This is definitely not how the web was meant to be.

Any ideas what to do about it? How to make it display in Elinks?

Opera (v.11), Firefox, and Webkit browsers display the page fine with JS enabled.

Re: What's wrong with Blogspot.com? (web standards)

Reply #1
It's an incredibly stupid yet also unbelievably common practice. One tiny error in the Javascript might make the entire site fail to load even in the best of circumstances. That happened to both Tumblr and Twitter over the past two years, and in response they've made their pages more sane.

I don't think there is anything that can be done, unless you know of a way to activate a mobile view on the page. Those are typically less JS-crazy. See e.g. Twitter's here.

Re: What's wrong with Blogspot.com? (web standards)

Reply #2
Ha, Vivaldi.com is inaccessible with JS off too. So much for regard for accessibility and web standards.

As to Blogspot.com, I found that the RSS feed downloads full articles. To be able to read an inaccessible blog means to find a way to download the article. Maybe there's a program that makes a pdf or txt of the page without the need to open a browser?

Re: What's wrong with Blogspot.com? (web standards)

Reply #3

Ha, Vivaldi.com is inaccessible with JS off too.

Can't confirm. It's probably only you. :)

Indeed. Never visited Vivaldi.com before.
It's a good advertisment for their Chrome-clone. Now I see why their 21-century-browser didn't provide an option to turn JS off.


Re: What's wrong with Blogspot.com? (web standards)

Reply #5
I see, my bad.  :(
I overlooked the ".com" since I've never been there.

Re: What's wrong with Blogspot.com? (web standards)

Reply #6
Meanwhile Vivaldi.com got fixed. Now they have a different design that displays a low-end version too. There was a thread about it at Vivaldi.net, so of course they must have understood the error of their ways.

And the styles button thingy in Vivaldi browser now has an effect in Vivaldi.com rather than not. That styles thingy is still quite shady, vastly inferior to Opera's straightforward CSS options. Some of the selections simply hide Blogspot.com and did the same to Vivaldi.com earlier.

Re: What's wrong with Blogspot.com? (web standards)

Reply #7
Vivaldi.com still only displays a spinner for me with JS disabled. It works in text-only browsers though.

Re: What's wrong with Blogspot.com? (web standards)

Reply #8

Vivaldi.com still only displays a spinner for me with JS disabled.

In what browser?

For me at first it loads text in Opera (v.11, JS off). When fully loaded, it starts spinning. When I switch to user styles, it displays nicely.



Re: What's wrong with Blogspot.com? (web standards)

Reply #11
Forbes.com and Nytimes.com use a similar technique to prevent web content as Blogspot. Is there a way around this? I want websites readable!

Re: What's wrong with Blogspot.com? (web standards)

Reply #12
nytimes.com seems to work for me? forbes.com doesn't with JS disabled though.

Forbes.com is quite interesting, where by interesting I mean absolutely ludicrous. Instead of putting the content on the page like you normally would, they stick it in a bit of JS in the header:

Code: [Select]
<script>try {
fbs_settings.content = {"id":"content_55ca5000e4b0dee06820a6eb",[…],"body":"<!--regular HTML here!-->"],[…]</script>


I guess they really fear people with JS disabled, maybe for ad purposes, but from my perspective all they're doing is making their website render slower, use more memory, and like I said half a year ago, set it up for complete rather than partial failure.

I suppose it'd be easy enough to extract just the content with some regexp or something, in this case. Exactly how to integrate that fluently I don't know.

Re: What's wrong with Blogspot.com? (web standards)

Reply #13
At Nytimes.com, the complaint applies at least to opinion pages.