
Eeek! The Web without JavaScript -- Do you design sites for the JS-impaired? - estherschindler
http://advice.cio.com/esther_schindler/eeek_the_web_without_javascript?source=nlt_cioinsider
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croby
This, to me, feels similar to the outdated practice of including all JS in
HTML comments for 'older browsers'. Crockford has a good paragraph on this in
one of his articles.

"The use of HTML comments in scripts dates further back to a transitional
problem between Netscape Navigator and Netscape Navigator 2. The latter
introduced the <script> tag. However, users of the former would see the script
as text because of the HTML convention that unrecognized markup is ignored.
The <!-- comment hack stopped being necessary by the time Netscape Navigator 3
came out. It certainly is not needed now. It is ugly and a waste of space."

People use to turn off JavaScript because the web was new and people were
using it improperly. Based on the proliferation of everything JS these days,
it feels like we've overcome this barrier, just like we've overcome Netscape
2.

I also feel like the analogy the author makes between 'designing for
accessibility' to 'using JavaScript' is improper. I think if the article
criticized the usage of Flash, it'd be a different story -- Flash used to be
completely inaccessible and it (still) requires someone to download a plugin
for it to work. Even so, youtube and the myspace music player (both Flash) are
still incredibly popular on the web -- despite that barrier to entry.
Something to think about -- maybe prompting to turn on JavaScript solves the
problem, just like saying you need to install flash solves the flash problem.

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brlewis
Interesting topic, but 40% seems like a high number of "buyers" with JS turned
off. I wonder if they counted all web hits as "people who buy" and 39% of
their hits came from bots.

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estherschindler
No. It was actual purchases. This was looking at the e-commerce sales, not the
site traffic overall.

There's another bit that I didn't include in the blog post because it was
irrelevant to the point... which was that the people running without
JavaScript had a high degree of (there's probably a more diplomatic word but
what the heck) stupidity. Stuff like adding a "special instruction" to "make
sure the book is signed" when the book _description_ says this is a signed
copy (and it's priced accordingly).

\--Esther

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Hexstream
What I plan to do for my first site is to to first load the page (javascript
included) as if Javascript was disabled, and then have the JS rearrange the
page (optimize it for javascript) if the code runs.

Any problems with that approach? It seems the most robust to me.

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tomjen
The question is: Is it worth it? Your time is a premium and users with
javascript off will properly not see any ads, so they will make no money.

This ofcause assumes that you are working at a typical web startup. YMMW

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asmosoinio
Does anyone have any statistics about users and JavaScript?

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edw519
Do you design sites for people without a mouse?

Do you design sites for people without a keyboard?

Do you design sites for people without a monitor?

Do you design sites for people without <you get the idea>?

