On 01/19/2018 06:04 AM, Paul Hänsch wrote:
And note, with this I'm only defending JavaScript for building user
interfaces, which I think is far too powerful a tool to be discarded; generally, the Web is far too powerful a technology to be discarded.
I believe this is a great misunderstanding. Scaling websites to different screen sizes, building menues, building responsive dialogs, play video, etc. does not require the use of JavaScript. For building user interfaces it is simply a sign of bad quality. Web standards to enable those features have been around for at least half a decade, and are nowadays well supported by browsers. Yet websites are increasingly forcing users to enable JavaScript for the most mundane features, just to remain usable. Many web services associated with Free Software make no exception, and are in my view a big part of the problem.
I think that our different viewpoints may be due to the fact that, as a web developer, I normally don't think of web sites as places to find information, but as programs. This program may, of course, be a CMS like Drupal or Plone, and in that case, no JavaScript is actually needed (even though the Plone guys are currently building a new JS-only interface called Pastanaga which is also a user experience project).
However, that limits the user interaction to the old GET/SUBMIT cycle. With JavaScript, it's possible to do everything you can do in a desktop application, within the limits of the sandbox. This gives us online applications such as LibreOffice Online, Etherpad, etc.
Indeed, one interesting paradigm is the new single-page-applications, i.e., no HTML pages are served by the server at all, the whole user interface is built up client-side in JavaScript, and the server only has to serve the data itself using e.g. a REST API.
If the application is available in a non-minified version, I think this is just as transparent and easy to inspect and debug (using browser tools like Firefox' Inspect facility) as desktop application (which can, indeed, be notoriously difficult to build from source). In other words, I don't see that technology (building user interfaces client-side, in JavaScript) as evil per se, and I see it as no more problematic for freedom than using compiled desktop applications with the source code available. The issue with patching changing code also arises with the constant updates send out, e.g., by Debian.
So - I don't see the use of JavaScript *per se* as problematic or in any way a threat to software freedom.
*Proprietary* JavaScript, however, as served by Google or Facebook or other proprietary software vendors, are another matter altogether. They do indeed violate users' freedom.
Best Carsten