Ask N.YC: How hard should we work to support those who don't use cookies or javascript?
...or who don't use css or who use a really low resolution?
what does today's audience expect?
what does today's audience expect?
Using cookies to run sessions is pretty much the norm, so trying to support stateful application behavior for people that refuse to use cookies sounds like a good way to waste a lot of time.
JavaScript .. well, if you're a public website then the whole thing should just work without JS and degrade gracefully where you do use it.
Having specific functionality JS-only is fine for certain applications, but it's considered good form (and for some government contracts - a requirement) to present an alternative non-JS interface for accessibility purposes.
Check out http://maps.google.com with JS disabled, for a good example.
Some frameworks handle this automatically. At worst, you append a parameter to each internal URL.
> JavaScript ... considered good form
Making your website degrade also helps visibility in search engines. Feel free to ignore this consideration but those who provide graceful degradation will have a small and sustained advantage over your efforts.
Moving the session cookie into the url is a bad idea -- it creates security holes (urls leak via referrers). Ironically, fear of cookies has actually hurt privacy and security.
Its a matter of the extra dev time vs reach of audience, which varies from site to site, I would say on average, I assume a reasonable resolution, with js and cookies enabled.
I dont think every person crippling functionality to cater for the maximum possible market is a good thing for the individual sites or the industry in general.
flickr came up as an example, but when flickr launched their 'organizr', you could count a handful of large sites that used heavy js / ajax interfaces, there were also a large number of photo sharing sites, while it wasnt the reason flickr won the photo sharing wars, providing an incredibly powerful and usable tool to let people work with their photos gave them a very good start.
Obviously for some sites (wikipedia) catering for handicapped users provides a huge benefit with very little negative impact on the standard user.
However I dont think a strict requirement, and if your application benefits a lot from scripted interface elements, go for it. If everyone sat and served static text pages. handicapped users will never get to enjoy the benefits of a fully featured scripted interface that will inevitably be created through new demand.
http://ejohn.org/blog/ajax-accessibility/ is also worth a read
On the other hand, I'd use javascript only to enable nice interactive additional features but the site should degrade gracefully when it's not. In fact I should probably state that as: The site works normally without javascript and "upgrades" if it's enabled. The "degrades gracefully" sounds like "semi-supported, absolute last resort".
I wouldn't do an all-ajax site...
If it's a complex web application, don't worry about the people without JavaScript enabled.
As for cookies, I think it's pretty much expected that they be enabled for any sort of login mechanism. The alternative is to pass a session token around in every URL, but the moment they close the browser or open a different URL that gets lost.
If you're site isn't easily crawlable by the search engines then you're pretty well hosed because that's where most users come from these days for most sites.
Same with Javascript. Who in your audience doesn't have that? If you're building an app people will want to use on mobile phones, clearly you should have an html only view. If you're making a project designed mainly for desktops, then 99% of people have js and cookies on. If it adds any good functionality at all, it has to be worth it.
The question, as posed, is to generalized to have a meaningful answer.
It seems some people disagree with your sentiment.
With a mouse (to downmod) and no keyboard (to enter the discussion), I'd just assume they hold a lot of contempt for you blocking everyone's wonderful javascript.
@topic:
I agree with Hexstream above. It's still important to simply not rely on the javascript, css, etc. Make the logic and interface simple and upgrade to "bells and whistles" mode if additional features are available on the client.
Also, that sucks you were downmodded so much without replies.
Edit: I guess you could use GMail, but without the fancy look.
Email is used for many business transactions, and for other types of meaningful communication between people. So, it can be estimated that email tends to enable profit due to this relationship-building and information-carrying ability.
And for simply being wrong, rather than offensive, a troll, or whatever.