There was a fundamental shift about 15 years ago where webpages ceased to be markup documents (perhaps with some active elements for convenience) and became javascript applications that ran in your web browser.

To use your book analogy - the web is no longer a bunch of books on a shelf, it's an AR device that shoots lasers into your eye. The net effect may be the same in many use-cases, but not necessarily, and malicious actors now have far more flexibility and power because we've all become accustomed to running random code we download off the internet with a single click.

I am, obviously, not a huge fan of this shift and think a large majority of sites could operate perfectly well under the "markup document" model without needing actual code-execution privileges, or more than a minimal set of code-execution privileges for those actual simple document-related use-cases. Go back to being mostly just a book, basically.

Almost all of the use-cases that javascript gets used for in a document context could really be replaced by navigation between sets of linked, static pages (perhaps embedded where needed) - boy, what an idea. If you delivered a site "as a gzip" then there should barely be any noticeable size difference from that anyway, especially compared to downloading mountains of JS embeds.

The amount of things that truly, truly need interactivity is pretty low - things like chat clients come to mind, but does your bank need to be running javascript on your end? Probably not.

You don't understand why someone would want to create something the way they want to, really?

How much choice do you have in the typesetting of any book you've ever bought?

You could still use a magnifying glass on your monitor, as some Russian General was photographed doing recently... .

.

Obviously I think the choice to disable zoom, etc, is daft, but ultimately that is the creator's right to call, advisedly or otherwise.

The choice to allow zoom, or scrolling, or window resizing, or even fonts and colors... basically anything that affects my web browsing experience, should belong to me as the user, not some web site developer 1,000 miles away from me. Browsers have taken way too much control from the user (or hidden it in Settings menus) and handed the controls over to web designers. Browsers have a setting to take back this zoom control, but really it shouldn't be a setting--it should be the default. The web developer should not have the ability to disable a feature of my browser any more than he should be able to reboot my machine.

I don't understand this argument. Leaving aside the fact that the examples provided in the link are hardly works of art, the "creator" has already created something the way they wanted to, as has every other website designer. And just like there would be no good reason for an editor to stop me from using a magnifying glass on a book that I bought, nor from writing notes in the pages or highlight parts of the text (advisedly or not), neither does anything justify disabling zoom.

For whatever reason, my Firefox was already ignoring these artificial restrictions intended by the creators, and I was able to zoom as normal. Does that affect the creators of these websites in any way whatsoever?

It is the creator's right to dictate the original presentation, but it is not the creator's right to dictate a user's behavior. Just like it is a filmmaker's right to set the default framerate and playback speed for a film, but you can rewind or fastforward, or play the film at X speed if you so wish in your media player.

Disabling or otherwise inhibiting user behavior is not a creator's right.

> I'm not sure why people believe they have a right to dictate how someone else's content is created.

I do not believe anyone here is at all believing that they have a right to dictate how someone else's content is created. The argument is about modification, not creation. People should absolutely have the ability to modify their local version of the content to make it readable to them.