Re: A new filter-based customization interface

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > >   > Why do you keep talking about the JavaScript which you don't
  > >   > like to load?
  > >
  > > That sentence seems to stretch words which are not contradictory so as
  > > to accuse them of being contradictory.

  > You continued to talk about JavaScript when I told you how you can avoid
  > it in this context (and possibly) others entirely.

It did not occur to me that you meant "Running with JS disabled
entirely will work, but running with JS active will not."  That is
an unusual situation so I did not imagine it.

If you had stated it carefully and clearly, you could have made it
understandable.

Instead of reprimanding people who do not get the meaning you
intended, please put more effort into stating your point concretely
and clearly.

  > > I _normally_ disable nonfree JS, by using LibreJS.  Are you trying to
  > > say that the site fails with LibreJS but would work properly if I were
  > > to disable JavaScrpt 100% instead?

  > I this context it should work properly but not in all websites. Sometime
  > websites have fallbacks for users who disable JavaScript completely for
  > their own personal reasons, for accessibility or to be compatible witn
  > legacy browsers. 

It is natural and inevitable that there are sites, with freely
licensed JS code, that will work if LibreJS is running but not if JS
is simply disabled.  We can't avoid that; that possibility is part
of the plan.

The existence of sites that do the opposite -- they work properly if
JS is disabled entirely but will not work with LibreJS - is not
inevitabkle.  But those sites create a perverse situation for the
users.  It means there is no one way of avoiding nonfree JavaScript
that works for all the sites that could in principle do this.  So the
that users need to remember that "For sites A, C, G and Q, you must
disable JavaScript.  For sites B, F, J and Z, you must use LibreJS."

That is inconvenient for users.

To avoid that kind of inconvenience, the community should ensure that
one of those two approaches (LibreJS, or disabling JS entirely)
dominates the other in terms of which sites it supports.

To give the users this simpler convenience, the sites which currently
work without nonfree software if JS is disabled, but do not do so with
LibreJS, ought to be changed so that their special hacks for disabled
JS also detect LibreJS active.

I think that can be done in JavaScript code by means of a conditional
which s described in
https://gnu.org/software/librejs/free-your-javascript.html.  Is it
there?

If you know of such a site, please do not tell people here that we
ought to remember to use that site by totally disabling JS.  Instead,
please utrge the developers of that site to use a condiional that will
detect both cases, and treat the browser-uses-LibreJS cae the same way
it now handles JS-deactivated.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)