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Minor quibble: at least in the US English version, the checkbox is actually labeled "Enable Javascript", not "Disable Javascript". > It's a great day for a web
by kijin 13y ago
Minor quibble: at least in the US English version, the checkbox is actually labeled "Enable Javascript", not "Disable Javascript".
> It's a great day for a web developer when we can finally assume that a browser will have JavaScript running.
That's a very good point. Even blind people no longer run their browsers with JS disabled [1]. As long as the content and navigation make semantic sense, I don't think there's any reason for a web designer or developer to refrain from adding frills with JS nowadays, any more than there is reason to refrain from using CSS. Both are integral parts of the package of specifications we call HTML5.
If a user even bothers to disable JS, he's intentionally asking you for a different experience, so give him a different experience! As long as the text is readable and the navigation links point to the right URLs, there's no need to try to make the <noscript> experience identical to the normal experience. No sane developer tries to make the no-CSS experience (e.g. lynx) identical to the normal experience, right?
My only complaint is with certain websites that make absolutely gratuitous use of JS, like using AJAX to load the text content of the page. That belongs to the same category as using tables for the entire layout. You don't go about disabling <table> tags just because people abuse it in annoying ways.
[1] http://a11yproject.com/posts/myth-screen-readers-dont-use-javascript/ http://a11yproject.com/posts/myth-screen-readers-dont-use-ja...
- kyllo 13y agoSpeaking of Lynx, I've run across pages that simply tell the user to "Please use a modern browser that supports Javascript." I expect the experience to be the different in a text-only browser, but what I don't expect is not to be offered an experience at all.
- jayflux 13y agoWithout coming across rude (I'm genuinely interested). Do people actually develop/design sites for text-only browsers? I thought that stopped happening over a decade ago.
- kyllo 13y agoSpecifically for text-only browsers? Probably not. But there are still people who enjoy the minimalist experience of a text-only browser, particularly for the speed, ease of reading, and keyboard control--not having to move the mouse and click on stuff. Plus they're more accessible to the blind. And they're often used for browser automation and web crawling / scraping code. Essentially all you need to do in order to not break the experience for text-only users, is to have your server generate a sane HTML document in the absence of JS and CSS. It's generally not that hard, unless your site is a single-page app where everything is in a client-side Javascript framework. In that case you would actually need to build two separate sites, and most devs probably aren't going to bother since text-only users are a low single digit percentage of internet users as a whole.
- DArcMattr 13y agoIf your site functions in Lynx, then your site will be crawlable by webspiders. I check that a site is functional that way before I publish it.