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"You are just being lazy" Why is this a value judgement? Making an interface work with and without Javascript takes more time - that's a given. Surely it's up

"You are just being lazy" Why is this a value judgement? Making an interface work with and without Javascript takes more time - that's a given. Surely it's up to the team working on it to decide if that time is better spent on something else?

bti 13y ago
Exactly. It is a business decision that each team makes. They need to decide if it is worth the extra man-hours and resources to appease a very small group of people who make a choice to turn off a big part of the web today. The best you can do is throw up a noscript message explaining why your app needs JavaScript.
- betterunix 13y ago
  "The best you can do is throw up a noscript message explaining why your app needs JavaScript." Unfortunately, this is almost always a message explaining that your website demands Javascript, without an explanation as to why. I have yet to see the noscript message that says, "We only had time to create one version of the website, and we are too busy doing other things to create a non-Javascript version." I am not even sure what sort of technical reason could be given for requiring Javascript for form submissions or hyperlink functionality...
betterunix 13y ago
"Making an interface work with and without Javascript takes more time" It should be a one-time cost if your design is not broken somewhere. There is not a lot of functionality that requires Javascript. I understand that having an in-browser spreadsheet automatically update cells as things change is going to be tough without Javascript, but that does not excuse the more basic things people use Javascript for: form submission, hyperlinks, loading text, etc. Your design is flawed, at a fundamental level, if you need to do a large amount of extra work to have this basic functionality work without Javascript. Really though, in an age of web toolkits and large frameworks for creating pages with all this Javascript, there should not be any need to make such a choice. Whatever you are building your website on should already support a non-Javascript version; the only real issue is when you need to do something that is not already part of that toolkit. Again, I understand that sometimes Javascript really does make a particular feature of a website possible, but I am asserting that the vast majority of Javascript out there has nothing to do with such features. "Surely it's up to the team working on it to decide if that time is better spent on something else?" Users have to deal with the consequences of those decisions. If I cannot pay my hospital bill without enabling Javascript, then I have to enable Javascript -- regardless of my reasons for disabling it (and if for some reason I cannot enable Javascript at all, I cannot pay my hospital bill). Whitelists are not really a great solution; any NoScript user has surely had to play the "enable Javascript here, here, here, and here" game, trying to guess which scripts are important for a website to function and which are malicious advertiser scripts.
- epochwolf 13y ago
  It's not a one-time. It's a continual maintenance headache. JavaScript allows for much nicer user interfaces than anything HTML can provide. As for gracefully degradation, I don't have time to support people without JavaScript. The best I can do is prevent those people from ever logging in by requiring javascript on the login form and rendering the support links client side.
wtbob 13y ago
> Surely it's up to the team working on it to decide if that time is better spent on something else? If your app doesn't work in links, lynx and w3m, then you're just being lazy.

bti 13y ago

Exactly. It is a business decision that each team makes. They need to decide if it is worth the extra man-hours and resources to appease a very small group of people who make a choice to turn off a big part of the web today. The best you can do is throw up a noscript message explaining why your app needs JavaScript.

betterunix 13y ago
"The best you can do is throw up a noscript message explaining why your app needs JavaScript." Unfortunately, this is almost always a message explaining that your website demands Javascript, without an explanation as to why. I have yet to see the noscript message that says, "We only had time to create one version of the website, and we are too busy doing other things to create a non-Javascript version." I am not even sure what sort of technical reason could be given for requiring Javascript for form submissions or hyperlink functionality...

betterunix 13y ago

"Making an interface work with and without Javascript takes more time" It should be a one-time cost if your design is not broken somewhere. There is not a lot of functionality that requires Javascript. I understand that having an in-browser spreadsheet automatically update cells as things change is going to be tough without Javascript, but that does not excuse the more basic things people use Javascript for: form submission, hyperlinks, loading text, etc. Your design is flawed, at a fundamental level, if you need to do a large amount of extra work to have this basic functionality work without Javascript. Really though, in an age of web toolkits and large frameworks for creating pages with all this Javascript, there should not be any need to make such a choice. Whatever you are building your website on should already support a non-Javascript version; the only real issue is when you need to do something that is not already part of that toolkit. Again, I understand that sometimes Javascript really does make a particular feature of a website possible, but I am asserting that the vast majority of Javascript out there has nothing to do with such features. "Surely it's up to the team working on it to decide if that time is better spent on something else?" Users have to deal with the consequences of those decisions. If I cannot pay my hospital bill without enabling Javascript, then I have to enable Javascript -- regardless of my reasons for disabling it (and if for some reason I cannot enable Javascript at all, I cannot pay my hospital bill). Whitelists are not really a great solution; any NoScript user has surely had to play the "enable Javascript here, here, here, and here" game, trying to guess which scripts are important for a website to function and which are malicious advertiser scripts.

epochwolf 13y ago
It's not a one-time. It's a continual maintenance headache. JavaScript allows for much nicer user interfaces than anything HTML can provide. As for gracefully degradation, I don't have time to support people without JavaScript. The best I can do is prevent those people from ever logging in by requiring javascript on the login form and rendering the support links client side.

wtbob 13y ago

> Surely it's up to the team working on it to decide if that time is better spent on something else? If your app doesn't work in links, lynx and w3m, then you're just being lazy.