web reading without javascript

[Ivan Shmakov]

>>>>> 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