

Ask HN: Is unobtrusive javascript/gracefully degradation important anymore? - ashchristopher

Twitter's new interface doesn't degrade gracefully (thought they do link to old twitter). What are the communities thoughts on this subject? I am working on a project and I spend 60% of my front-end time making sure that it works without JS even though I have every intention of it being used with JS enabled? Is it a waste of time? Should I focus on releasing the product and to hell with degrading gracefully?
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CPops
Devoting such a significant percentage of your time and resources to what
likely amounts to less than 1% of your users doesn't sound like a wise
business decision in most circumstances.

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homecoded
I'd say this is about right. Even mobile devices have great JavaScript
abilities nowadays. Think Android or iPhone. I am still using an ancient Sony
Ericsson with Opera Mini and JavaScript works surprisingly well.

Besides, I like you attitude. Making stuff work for everyone is a great and
noble goal! Unfortunately, that's only worth your time if your goal is to
learn, not to earn money.

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grok2
I think, yes, for content oriented sites (seo benefit, helps to allow people
to continue to view content, etc), but if it's an app/utility site, I think
there is no point in adding to your workload...

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kls
I would assume for a content oriented site the most optimal development path
would be a CMS as opposed to custom development. Something like Drupal or
Wordpress is going to give you a significant time to market advantage over
developing a site in either a server side or client side framework.

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blahedo
Yes it's important, no it's not a waste of time. Aside from the people who
intentionally turn off JS in their browser, there are people with readers or
other interfaces that don't support JS (or, not well), and most bots trying to
crawl and find and possibly link to your content are going to behave, at best,
unpredictably in the face of a JS-heavy site.

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bmelton
I suppose I'm in the minority here, but at least the way I build applications,
I build in the 'vanilla' way first and foremost.

Submissions go to another page, as do clicks and all that jazz. It's quicker
for me to get the MVP up and running first, and then later add the JS
niceties.

Obviously, there are use cases where this is flipped around -- mapping, for
example, and I'm sure many others -- but at least for me, I don't understand
why it's even a hardship to make it work for nonJS users, as that's what I
always build first.

Workflow aside, you're probably right, at least for end users. Almost every
device worth supporting out there is 'modern' enough that they support jQuery,
Dojo, et al.

The real trick is of course the other important devices that aren't users.
Search engines. Crawlers aren't necessarily capable of following your
application flow without graceful degradation, and in this day and age, that
likely matters as much or nearly as much as actual users.

