Maby I'm going senile -but really cool min-effect now

[jrog]

Take a look at how much of their site actually has useful content on first load:

http://imgur.com/k2p88

I don't understand what this is supposed to show, exactly. The material that displays in the sliding banner (which is disabled in your screenshot) is very useful to me; it quickly provides me with information about new posts in a single view, without requiring me to scroll through the page to find them. So, from my perspective, this screenshot shows that useful content is missing when NoScript is used in this case.

So yeah, you get to stare at two iterations of the same garbage that's filling up the page halfway down. It's useless fluff.

I just visited the page and the sliding banner actually does not show me a second iteration of any post that is visible on my screen, so I am not experiencing a "two iterations" problem. The top post right now is about the name chosen for Ubuntu 13.04. The banner slides are about Asus laptops with Ubuntu, new Ubuntu merchandise, Canonical's efforts to improve gaming on Ubuntu, and a weather app called Stormcloud. There is no duplication here, and it is very useful to me, as I get all of this information in one view without having to search around the site or do any scrolling. (Now sure, sometimes one of the banner slides is linked to the top post, resulting in one small bit of duplicate content. But there are also typically 3 or 4 other slides that are not duplicate content, again quickly providing me with more information in one view than I could have otherwise had. Still useful.)

I also happen to enjoy the dynamic nature of the sliding banner, as a purely aesthetic matter. So, aside from its usefulness, it is also nice to look at and brings me a bit of enjoyment. It's pretty. Many people enjoy things that look pretty; that is probably why these things are becoming rather prevalent on the web. You may not feel the same, but that is no reason to proclaim to all of us that "we" have learned to use NoScript to avoid (allegedly) "useless fluff" that is "at best silly."

I have seen many threads like this asking about the performance issues that this site has. For years, it's always been some out-of-control javascript.

This is the one spot where I could agree that NoScript has a niche use -- runaway JavaScript that creates performance issues. However, I rarely encounter such scripts/issues, and when I do, I can simply quickly disable the script using built-in tools or much smaller and less invasive tools than NoScript. NoScript itself still strikes me as overkill, partly for reasons addressed in this post: http://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/ar...much_noscript/

Gradients and trendy html5 CSS does not equal elegance. Good design is elegance.

Agreed.

Had to fix a machine running OSX 10.4 today. It's ugly as hell but it's just as elegant as it was years ago.

Not sure that I agree here, though. Something that's ugly as hell can certainly be elegant in some ways, but it will not be elegant insofar as it is ugly as hell, because ugliness detracts from overall elegance. And, in my experience, using NoScript often results in ugliness (or at least less beauty than I would have otherwise enjoyed) and a less pleasing user experience. Perhaps I could spend a lot of time customizing its settings exactly to my needs in order to avoid this (though I'm not sure about that), but that would consume time that I would rather enjoy doing things that I actually want to do.

Anyway, I didn't intend to turn this into a debate about NoScript and its usefulness. It certainly can sometimes fill an important role. I only wrote what I did because your earlier post about what "we" have learned and about how "silly" and "useless" some things are struck me as a bit condescending and myopic, to be honest. As I said, feel free to use NoScript to your heart's content. For others, what you regard as "useless fluff" is making the web more enjoyable and even providing information that is actually quite useful.