6 ms·

>assume it is my goal to cater to as many users as possible The thing is, it's not your goal to cater to as many users as possible. It's your goal to optimize

>assume it is my goal to cater to as many users as possible The thing is, it's not your goal to cater to as many users as possible. It's your goal to optimize your ROI on development time. The reason we have to have laws about accessibility is that your average fast food place knows that wheelchair-bound hamburger sales will never make back the cost of constructing a wheelchair ramp. The economics of the situation wouldn't provide for disabled people, so we have to have regulation to make sure they get taken care of. (And before anyone jumps on that and misinterprets me, I am not comparing disabilities to turning off JavaScript. I'm simply showing by example that it is not good business to try to grab every possible customer at any cost.)

dclowd9901 14y ago
Indeed, I think your accessibility argument is spot-on. The same issues apply for making websites accessible. Thankfully, more often than not, it behooves a site to follow accessibility, because it falls in line with semantic web design, which in turn plays better with Google. Google search, in a way, is the regulatory body to keep sites semantic and accessible.
- 385668 14y ago
  That's true, and at some point, I assume they'll make the site play well with noscript, but they've written the new version of the site from the ground up in six weeks with ten people. I'll give them some time to get things right.
mirkules 14y ago
I'm tired of having this argument over and over again, so let's approach this Javascript issue from a different angle: It is bad practice to couple content (the "what") with functionality (the "how"). The content itself should not depend on how it is displayed. From an engineering standpoint, this makes your code unmanageable and unmaintainable in the long run. These stupid shortcuts of forcing users to have Javascript on just to display content only cause me minor inconvenience, but it will cause you much more harm when it's maintenance or upgrade time. But you or everyone else on the JS bandwagon don't need to listen to me - I'll "temporarily allow" only the minimal amount of scripts on your page to see what I want to see and I will move on. You will need to live with this code during the next update cycle.
- eps 14y ago
  There are certain design elements that translate into a single line of JS, but require a couple of pages worth of CSS voodoo. Guess what's more maintainable.
  - mirkules 14y ago
    So we compensate for a lack of CSS libraries by mixing presentation layer with content layer. Nice.
    - eps 14y ago
      You brought up the maintenance angle, and the response to that is that in some cases it's far more practical to use js for atyling than to rely purely on css. I gave an example below - a sticky page footer - do show me how to do it in the confines of your abstraction model. Abstarting things for the sake of abstracting is a rather naive approach. It's a good starting point, but some abstractions complicate things way beyond what's needed.
      - mirkules 14y ago
        While I agree that exceptions in very rare cases are needed, exceptions are becoming the norm and, like I said, are coupling functionality and content. This is why CSS was created, to decouple style from content, and now? We are are throwing all that work away because an entire generation of web devs are just too lazy to look it up. By the way, a quick search for sticky page footer on Google turned up this as the first result -- no JS needed, and it didn't even look that hard (http://www.cssstickyfooter.com/using-sticky-footer-code.html http://www.cssstickyfooter.com/using-sticky-footer-code.html).
        huhtenberg 14y ago
        All CSS solutions, including yours, require vertical margins on all page elements to be 0px, which is clearly an obscure and senseless restriction.
nowarninglabel 14y ago
You realize, many countries, most importantly the U.S., have laws regarding making web sites accessible? Section 508 requires that they work with Javascript off. This applies mostly to government sites, but was also used in a case against Target, in which Target lost and was forced to make their website more accessible.
- mistercow 14y ago
  Target's situation was a bit of a special case, however, as it has a brick and mortar store, which the court found their website was essentially a component of. If your business is completely web-based, the question of whether section 508 applies to you is, as far as I know, untested.

dclowd9901 14y ago

Indeed, I think your accessibility argument is spot-on. The same issues apply for making websites accessible. Thankfully, more often than not, it behooves a site to follow accessibility, because it falls in line with semantic web design, which in turn plays better with Google. Google search, in a way, is the regulatory body to keep sites semantic and accessible.

385668 14y ago
That's true, and at some point, I assume they'll make the site play well with noscript, but they've written the new version of the site from the ground up in six weeks with ten people. I'll give them some time to get things right.

mirkules 14y ago

I'm tired of having this argument over and over again, so let's approach this Javascript issue from a different angle: It is bad practice to couple content (the "what") with functionality (the "how"). The content itself should not depend on how it is displayed. From an engineering standpoint, this makes your code unmanageable and unmaintainable in the long run. These stupid shortcuts of forcing users to have Javascript on just to display content only cause me minor inconvenience, but it will cause you much more harm when it's maintenance or upgrade time. But you or everyone else on the JS bandwagon don't need to listen to me - I'll "temporarily allow" only the minimal amount of scripts on your page to see what I want to see and I will move on. You will need to live with this code during the next update cycle.

eps 14y ago
There are certain design elements that translate into a single line of JS, but require a couple of pages worth of CSS voodoo. Guess what's more maintainable.
- mirkules 14y ago
  So we compensate for a lack of CSS libraries by mixing presentation layer with content layer. Nice.
  - eps 14y ago
    You brought up the maintenance angle, and the response to that is that in some cases it's far more practical to use js for atyling than to rely purely on css. I gave an example below - a sticky page footer - do show me how to do it in the confines of your abstraction model. Abstarting things for the sake of abstracting is a rather naive approach. It's a good starting point, but some abstractions complicate things way beyond what's needed.
    - mirkules 14y ago
      While I agree that exceptions in very rare cases are needed, exceptions are becoming the norm and, like I said, are coupling functionality and content. This is why CSS was created, to decouple style from content, and now? We are are throwing all that work away because an entire generation of web devs are just too lazy to look it up. By the way, a quick search for sticky page footer on Google turned up this as the first result -- no JS needed, and it didn't even look that hard (http://www.cssstickyfooter.com/using-sticky-footer-code.html http://www.cssstickyfooter.com/using-sticky-footer-code.html).
      - huhtenberg 14y ago
        All CSS solutions, including yours, require vertical margins on all page elements to be 0px, which is clearly an obscure and senseless restriction.

nowarninglabel 14y ago

You realize, many countries, most importantly the U.S., have laws regarding making web sites accessible? Section 508 requires that they work with Javascript off. This applies mostly to government sites, but was also used in a case against Target, in which Target lost and was forced to make their website more accessible.

mistercow 14y ago
Target's situation was a bit of a special case, however, as it has a brick and mortar store, which the court found their website was essentially a component of. If your business is completely web-based, the question of whether section 508 applies to you is, as far as I know, untested.