Eeek! The Web without JavaScript -- Do you design sites for the JS-impaired? | Hacker News Reader

Eeek! The Web without JavaScript -- Do you design sites for the JS-impaired?

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This, to me, feels similar to the outdated practice of including all JS in HTML comments for 'older browsers'. Crockford has a good paragraph on this in one of his articles.

"The use of HTML comments in scripts dates further back to a transitional problem between Netscape Navigator and Netscape Navigator 2. The latter introduced the <script> tag. However, users of the former would see the script as text because of the HTML convention that unrecognized markup is ignored. The <!-- comment hack stopped being necessary by the time Netscape Navigator 3 came out. It certainly is not needed now. It is ugly and a waste of space."

People use to turn off JavaScript because the web was new and people were using it improperly. Based on the proliferation of everything JS these days, it feels like we've overcome this barrier, just like we've overcome Netscape 2.

I also feel like the analogy the author makes between 'designing for accessibility' to 'using JavaScript' is improper. I think if the article criticized the usage of Flash, it'd be a different story -- Flash used to be completely inaccessible and it (still) requires someone to download a plugin for it to work. Even so, youtube and the myspace music player (both Flash) are still incredibly popular on the web -- despite that barrier to entry. Something to think about -- maybe prompting to turn on JavaScript solves the problem, just like saying you need to install flash solves the flash problem.

Interesting topic, but 40% seems like a high number of "buyers" with JS turned off. I wonder if they counted all web hits as "people who buy" and 39% of their hits came from bots.

No. It was actual purchases. This was looking at the e-commerce sales, not the site traffic overall.

There's another bit that I didn't include in the blog post because it was irrelevant to the point... which was that the people running without JavaScript had a high degree of (there's probably a more diplomatic word but what the heck) stupidity. Stuff like adding a "special instruction" to "make sure the book is signed" when the book description says this is a signed copy (and it's priced accordingly).

--Esther

What I plan to do for my first site is to to first load the page (javascript included) as if Javascript was disabled, and then have the JS rearrange the page (optimize it for javascript) if the code runs.

Any problems with that approach? It seems the most robust to me.

The question is: Is it worth it? Your time is a premium and users with javascript off will properly not see any ads, so they will make no money.

This ofcause assumes that you are working at a typical web startup. YMMW

Does anyone have any statistics about users and JavaScript?

Do you design sites for people without a mouse?

Do you design sites for people without a keyboard?

Do you design sites for people without a monitor?

Do you design sites for people without <you get the idea>?

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