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> It's always a good idea to have your site degrade gracefully. This will help users enjoy your content even if their browser doesn't have compatible JavaScript

> It's always a good idea to have your site degrade gracefully. This will help users enjoy your content even if their browser doesn't have compatible JavaScript implementations. It will also help visitors with JavaScript disabled or off, as well as search engines that can't execute JavaScript yet. I'm glad that they included this. I get that Javascript is required to make certain sites work the way they do, but I'm appalled by the number of sites that require Javascript just to display static text. Google themselves are guilty of this. Google Groups is (for the most part) just an archive of email mailing lists, but try reading a thread on Google Groups with Javascript disabled![0] There are very few sites that cannot gracefully downgrade to at least some degree, and there are very good reasons for doing so. A major one is that AJAX-heavy sites tend not to perform well on slow connections[1] (again, assuming essentially static content here). If you want your users to be able to access your site on-the-go, graceful degradation is your friend. [0] It's especially ironic now that Google Groups is the only place to read many old Usenet archives going back as far as the early 1980s. [1] Try browsing Twitter on a slow (ie, tethered, or "Amtrak wifi" level connection). For a website that originally originated as a way to send messages over SMS, and is still used that way in other parts of the world, it degrades amazingly poorly over slow connections.

ludwigvan 12y ago
The problem is, it is not easy to gracefully degrade. Users have become so accustomed to pages enhanced with JS that it is not possible to not use it even for most simple sites. If you want to go gracefully degrade, it is going to take a lot of effort nowadays. Of course, some new tech like isomorphic rendering (Airbnb's render, React's renderToString) helps this, but again, this is not as easy as it sounds.
icehawk219 12y ago
This is a worrying trend I've been noticing as well. The last couple of years especially I've noticed a very large increase in people just not caring about graceful downgrading as well as people just not even testing in other browsers. I've had many conversations with people that are huge fans of Angular and Backbone and similar frameworks and when I mention people without Javascript I just get the canned "but everyone has Javascript turned on anyway and if they don't, too bad" response. Interestingly enough every one of them were also people who developed and tested only against Chrome and never even bothered to acknowledge other browsers. I know someone who is a developer who actually likes IE and uses it as their main browser and for years they've dealt with breaking bugs on sites like Github and other popular tech sites because people just don't even test in other browsers any more. The cynic in me wants to say that this mentality is pushed for by companies like Google because no Javascript means no spying. But honestly I think it really just comes down to laziness. So few people truly care about their craft.
- agentS 12y ago
  Out of curiosity, what form of "spying" do you think is enabled by Javascript that would not be possible without Javascript? Edit: And since I replied to a small part of your comment, I should say that I disagree completely with your "few people truly care about their craft" statement. At least, I think that writing code that handles a lack of Javascript is only valuable if you have enough users to justify it. i.e. if you spend 20% of your time working on features for 0.1% of users, then you are doing a disservice to the rest of your users. Even more so if you have to compromise the experience for everyone else such that degrading is an option. In some cases, you go out of your way to accommodate small fractions of your audience. ARIA and catering to those with disabilities is a good example. But turning off JS is a choice; one I respect, but feel no obligation to cater to. I think pages should show a noscript warning, but other than that, its a matter of engineering tradeoffs.
  - cpeterso 12y ago
    Some analytics companies track mouse movements to watch how people interact with web pages. They can also use JavaScript to fingerprint browsers beyond what is available with cookies.
userbinator 12y ago
> but I'm appalled by the number of sites that require Javascript just to display static text. I encounter these (a lot of them blogs -- a perfect example of static text, maybe images, that should be readable with just about any browser) when searching via Google, and the text-only cache option tends to be quite useful for getting the text that I want to read. If that doesn't show the content, then I go back --- there's plenty of other sites out there, if you don't make it easy to read your content I'll just go somewhere else where I can find the same thing. At least with Google Groups it seems some of it is readable without JS now -- e.g. try this link with JS off: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/comp.lang.python https://groups.google.com/d/forum/comp.lang.python
- JamesSwift 12y ago
  "To use Google Groups Discussions, please enable JavaScript in your browser settings, and then refresh this page."

ludwigvan 12y ago

The problem is, it is not easy to gracefully degrade. Users have become so accustomed to pages enhanced with JS that it is not possible to not use it even for most simple sites. If you want to go gracefully degrade, it is going to take a lot of effort nowadays. Of course, some new tech like isomorphic rendering (Airbnb's render, React's renderToString) helps this, but again, this is not as easy as it sounds.

icehawk219 12y ago

This is a worrying trend I've been noticing as well. The last couple of years especially I've noticed a very large increase in people just not caring about graceful downgrading as well as people just not even testing in other browsers. I've had many conversations with people that are huge fans of Angular and Backbone and similar frameworks and when I mention people without Javascript I just get the canned "but everyone has Javascript turned on anyway and if they don't, too bad" response. Interestingly enough every one of them were also people who developed and tested only against Chrome and never even bothered to acknowledge other browsers. I know someone who is a developer who actually likes IE and uses it as their main browser and for years they've dealt with breaking bugs on sites like Github and other popular tech sites because people just don't even test in other browsers any more. The cynic in me wants to say that this mentality is pushed for by companies like Google because no Javascript means no spying. But honestly I think it really just comes down to laziness. So few people truly care about their craft.

agentS 12y ago
Out of curiosity, what form of "spying" do you think is enabled by Javascript that would not be possible without Javascript? Edit: And since I replied to a small part of your comment, I should say that I disagree completely with your "few people truly care about their craft" statement. At least, I think that writing code that handles a lack of Javascript is only valuable if you have enough users to justify it. i.e. if you spend 20% of your time working on features for 0.1% of users, then you are doing a disservice to the rest of your users. Even more so if you have to compromise the experience for everyone else such that degrading is an option. In some cases, you go out of your way to accommodate small fractions of your audience. ARIA and catering to those with disabilities is a good example. But turning off JS is a choice; one I respect, but feel no obligation to cater to. I think pages should show a noscript warning, but other than that, its a matter of engineering tradeoffs.
- cpeterso 12y ago
  Some analytics companies track mouse movements to watch how people interact with web pages. They can also use JavaScript to fingerprint browsers beyond what is available with cookies.

userbinator 12y ago

> but I'm appalled by the number of sites that require Javascript just to display static text. I encounter these (a lot of them blogs -- a perfect example of static text, maybe images, that should be readable with just about any browser) when searching via Google, and the text-only cache option tends to be quite useful for getting the text that I want to read. If that doesn't show the content, then I go back --- there's plenty of other sites out there, if you don't make it easy to read your content I'll just go somewhere else where I can find the same thing. At least with Google Groups it seems some of it is readable without JS now -- e.g. try this link with JS off: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/comp.lang.python https://groups.google.com/d/forum/comp.lang.python

JamesSwift 12y ago
"To use Google Groups Discussions, please enable JavaScript in your browser settings, and then refresh this page."