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Šime Vidas

Somebody at Google thought they’re being funny. I don’t think this is funny. It’s wrong. The exact opposite should be true. Whatever remains must *not* be an empty page.

@simevidas
100% agree. I added noscript to firefox on my phone (since I'm commuting more, I want to limit data usage when I'm browsing) It's amazing how many sites just give you NOTHING until you turn their scripts on. Yeah, it's a pain to toggle scripts on until the page works, but you really get a feel for how much crap we devs push up.

@simevidas @mcpaccard if only there was a low level method of presenting visuals on the web???

@simevidas there's obviously enough data in the url (= request) for the server, to get him to answer with a (static but who cares?) map of the requested area.
That, right there, is just lazy.

@KewlCat

To add insult to injury, Google Maps used to do this. I remember when Google Maps worked fine on the browser on my Palm pilot. Maps detected the browser and served static map images.

@simevidas

@KewlCat @simevidas it’s not laziness. It’s a cost-benefit choice that the Maps team seems to have made. Even making a non JavaScript version takes a not so insignificant amount of dev resources.

@simevidas A website that only delivers JavaScript to the Google crawler could never appear in Google search results 😆

@simevidas It does imply that Javascript is "the impossible", which tracks.

@simevidas@mastodon.social For something like Maps it seems a lot more reasonable though.

@ottergauze An interactive Google Maps applications is not possible without JavaScript, but that doesn’t mean that it’s OK to just show a blank page. For example, Google could show the map as a static image, and if there’s a marker on the map, that marker could be positioned via CSS.

@simevidas the only thing worse is a site where you allowlist all the local JS that should be enough to get it running, but it ends up breaking because some 3rd party tracker didn't get loaded.

@simevidas also, I find it very funny that it says "the JavaScript" lol. Sounds a bit like when an older generation says "The YouTubes"

@simevidas WOW - I always thought what was left should be a readable and usable HTML file.

@simevidas well on the second look - this page is not what it claims to be at all - because actually it's not an empty page. It's a bad one, though.

@simevidas

#GoogleMaps has got some intentionally horrible wording there. It's very typical of #Google to enforce fingerprinting #JavaScript for everything they can get hands on.

@simevidas
ah ya that's true "the web is an app that we host" every right there

@simevidas how would Google maps without JS even work, static map images with links to pan?

@nkizz When it comes to no JavaScript, the goal isn’t to implement the same functionality as the JS version. The goal is to provide *some* functionality. Any functionality is better than a blank page. A static map with CSS-positioned location labels would be better than nothing. The labels could be links to pages with more information about the location.