The National Weather Service, one of the few parts of the United States Government that does genuine good and nothing else, now has a website that is functionally inaccessible without a JavaScript-contaminated "Web" browser.
I am so fucking tired of everyone and their mother deciding that reinventing pure and simple HTML in fucking supercomputer-needing slow as script JavaShit is somehow the better future of the World Wide Web.
YOUR WEBSITE IS NOT THE ONLY APPLICATION I NEED TO RUN AT A SINGLE TIME! YOUR WEBSITE SHOULDN'T EVEN **BE** A FUCKING APPLICATION JUST TO SHOW SIMPLE TEXT, YOU TECHBRO-ADMIRING DUMBASSES!
Weather.gov is back to the way it's been for a while. Local forecasts are accessible in JS-disable and JS-free browsers again.
I hope they got complaints of the sort I could only send into the void and realized what they undid was a bad decision.
@arielmt I don't think it's ironic. A dynamic realtime communications platform is different from a source of information with a single controlling entity providing it for you to read.
@arielmt With that said, I would utterly love a fediverse microblog implementation that serves entirely static html for your feeds and optionally updates when you interact with first-gen ajax mechanisms, falling back gracefully to page reload if js is disabled.
@arielmt I’m guessing it’s just the convenience of having dynamic elements without any load to the server
@arielmt There is at least a URL you can use to see a text only output of the forecast, I look at it a lot and it does still show up in Lynx as of today:
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=37&lon=-84&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=text&TextType=1
(swapping out the lat/long for what you need)
That doesn't forgive the rest of the shit going on and who knows if they'll cut this off at some point, but it's nice to have it.
@arielmt I don't even know how you would FIND this option on their site and have never figured that out, I literally just found someone who posted this URL once and have had it in my bookmarks ever since, this is what I want the site to be by default
@lori What's really bad is that this is precisely the format of URL that the "Text Only Forecast" link pointed to until this week. (Also, the "Printable Forecast" link points to the exact same URL, except the "TextType" query string parameter is "2" instead of "1".)
@arielmt amazing
@arielmt seems like it's fixed now? Perhaps a very dumb way for them to temporarily disable that page.
@mcrees Thank you for the refreshing news. :3
@arielmt It reminds me of when I made a website using as few JS as possible and using a cheap host, the permalink redirect was pretty much the only one I used it, but there was a "click here to continue" fallback. Now thinking better about it I think I could have avoided that.
The irony of complaining about websites turned applications is not lost on me, one who runs and pays the bills for a website turned application that I'm using to voice that complaint.