“Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”
The future is clearly http://www.britannica.com
The future is clearly http://www.britannica.com
In an age,
* where the Internet can be seen on ever increasing number of diverse devices
* where every day people discover that every additional layer of software complexity adds security vulnerabilities
* where the default installation of even many existing heavily used browsers, for both personal and business, have everything except html and stylesheets disabled, especially for new sites
* where some/many people may wish to choose to use your site in its most bare form possible, including command line users
* etc.
you choose to ignore all of these usage scenarios by not even having a graceful fallback for your site?
Thankfully, most web administrators and developers are not as short-sighted as you, even most start-ups!
One more thing: if a new site, even one that has been heavilty recommended to me, does not provide even basic information without scripting or has a horrible front-page with a default NoScript Firefox installation, I treat it as I would a spam site and I immediately desist from using the site and ignore the link.
You will not waste my time with lack of basic Web competence and awareness.
I think people disabling JS for security should be willing to accept the downfalls.
"where the default installation of even many existing heavily used browsers, for both personal and business, have everything except html and stylesheets disabled, especially for new sites"
I don't know what you're talking about here. I've never seen a default install of any browser (on a desktop) except IE in Windows server have JS off by default
"where some/many people may wish to choose to use your site in its most bare form possible, including command line users"
I will grant command line users should be accommodated where they will be expected to be a large proportion of your users (linux install instructions, for example) otherwise, give me a break. Why should I take my time working for .01% of users using a command line.
Now, I don't think this means that people should be using JS when it's not necessary, like if your page is mostly text. But all of the use cases you cite are a small minority of the users of most sites.
Of course we still want and need curated collections of information. But I fail to see the value of large collections of information that say a tiny bit about everything. I think the real value comes from knowledgable experts curating information about their niche. Which in my experience is not at all what traditional encyclopedias were (I'm 24).
11 years after the web ate their expensive lunch meetings, they still don't get the web.
I remember reading somewhere google executes javascript as part of its crawling...
They have interesting robots.txt, though:
http://www.britannica.com/robots.txt
I would recommend them to hire a web designer.
But hypothetically, even if it were completely JavaScript-dependent, the trend is clearly toward sites that involve more JavaScript, not less, so I don't see why that would preclude being "the future."
Huh, I just pulled up five articles at random and they all had edit buttons. Granted, it doesn't let you edit the main article, but you can create your own version of one or send a suggestion/correction to the editor.