So there is nothing wrong with choosing to not support 2 out of every 100 users; that's simply a time/cost assessment. What's wrong with you?
[1] http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2010/10/how-many-...
It's OK to develop for your target audience, right?
Of course this doesn't apply here, but I wanted to be dramatic. Should be piece of cake to just show the full content if javascript is off, since it is already loading all of it.
> The point is that it's trivial to make a site like this usable without JS, with little effort. You just have to start with the right mindset.
How are you supposed to make a instant search usable without JS?
If it doesn't need to be instant, just normal search with a nice GET /search?q=border, one would have to program a server side script to do that search.
Or maybe you'd just want to show the whole reference on the HTML, then the JS would have to use that to do the search and hide/show the appropriate div, or you'd have to load everything twice (once in the HTML body and again via ajax). Even then, what's the point? It's a instant search. If the user can't use the only feature of it, he's better off googling.
Is there other way that I'm missing? I don't see that as "trivial".
document.getElementsByTagName('html')[0].className += ' js'
.js #search-results { display:none; }
The point is that it's trivial to make a site like this usable without JS, with little effort. You just have to start with the right mindset.
These days, both of the major mobile browsers use WebKit and have great JavaScript support, though they may not support bleeding-edge browser functionality quite yet (for which all non-demo sites definitely need fallbacks). The unofficial mobile browsers have great JavaScript too. Consoles have decent browsers with decent JavaScript, and in any case not all sites need to expect console browsers as a remotely common case.
You have to draw the line somewhere, and not all sites need to support Lynx, Links, or Mosaic. I certainly agree that having decent fallbacks for a site like this doesn't require that much effort, but not all functionality supports graceful degradation.
These days, browsing without JavaScript seems less likely to indicate an older browser, and more likely to indicate a user with JavaScript intentionally disabled using something like NoScript. That user may get righteously offended that a document would dare to run code on their system, but that doesn't necessarily make them right.
All web features tend to follow a three-step lifecycle: too new to use at all except for demos, stable enough to use with fallbacks for older browsers, universal enough to use without fallbacks. Depending on your site and your target audience, basic JavaScript may fall in the second or the third category.
Anyway, it's just a couple of extra lines of code, get over it :)
However, many sites use more advanced JavaScript features which do not necessarily allow for graceful degradation.
(Also, most other mobile browsers of the type you allude to consist of barely more than WAP; only the simplest of non-interactive websites has any hope of working with them. And many sites simply won't have any of those users in their target audience.)
Cut him some slack! I harbor many doubts re: your competence in the realm of friendliness.
There's got a be a more polite way to phrase that.
Also, while I understand the reasons for disabling JavaScript generally, is this really something to get that upset about?
My reactions to broken-without-JS sites spring from security, privacy, usability, and accessibility concerns. "Sites that completely break without JS" is a category that strongly correlates with "sites that have major issues in at least one of those four categories."