>>>>> [...] that individuals who experience Cesar disorders like >>>>> epilepsy, cannot use JavaScript either. >>>> I cannot see anything about epilepsy that would have any bearing >>>> on whether you can use a JavaScript-capable browser. [...] >>> Its not the browser, it is the scripting. [...] >> Ah, so it's not actually JavaScript per se, it's really the >> bells-whistles-and-gongs kind of user interface that JavaScript >> tends to go along with? > Actually, that feels a bit like the guns don't kill people argument.
I can understand that, but I'd say it's more like the "hammers don't kill people" argument. Guns are designed specifically to kill, or at least injure, and, while they have other uses, there are comparatively few such other uses and guns are not particularly well suited to most of them. Hammers, while they certainly can kill, are not designed with that as their primary design goal, and they have plenty of other uses, many of which are a better fit to them than killing is. Similarly, yes, JavaScript can indeed produce seizure-triggering visual effects...but those are not its primary design goal, and it has a lot of other uses, many of which are a better fit to the language. As a simple example, suppose you have a form that wants to accept a Canadian postal code: letter-digit-letter-digit-letter-digit. JavaScript can verify that the entered string fits that pattern without needing to do a round-trip to the backend server, thereby saving frustration (filling out the whole form only to be told that field's syntax is wrong) and resource usage (the network bandwidth and backend cycles involved). (Indeed, I'd say that animated GIFs would be a better fit for your argument than JavaScript is; while still not really designed to induce seizures, it's closer, and it's got fewer other uses.) > If the result of the scripting causes injury, much like the result of > some words and some guns cause injury, is there not some blame for > JavaScript as well? Some. The tool certainly has to bear *some* of the responsibility for its use. But, when the tool does not come readier to that use than to many other, far less harmful (even helpful!) uses, then I will generally apportion more of the blame to the user than the tool - just as, to continue the analogy above, if someone kills someone with a hammer, I would place only a tiny bit of the blame on the hammer. The major way in which the analogy breaks down is that it is really popular to do visually obnoxious things with JavaScript. But I blame the webmasters for choosing to impose that sort of UI on their viewers far more than I blame JavaScript for being sufficiently general-purpose to do that. You might as well blame your monitor for being too fast to respond to changes in what the computer is displaying! I'm no JavaScript apologist. I use lynx too, and I consider it a bug in a website when it fails for lack of JavaScript without any actual need to. See my blah post of 2009-Nov-28 (http://ftp.rodents-montreal.org/mouse/blah/2009-11-28-1.html) for an example in a different domain (wanting cookies enabled instead of wanting JS support) and some of my stances on such matters. I just don't think it's fair to blame JS for how it gets used here. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [email protected] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B _______________________________________________ Lynx-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lynx-dev
