How to detect if JavaScript is disabled?

Question

There was a post this morning asking about how many people disable JavaScript. Then I began to wonder what techniques might be used to determine if the user has it disabled.

Answer 1

A common solution is to the meta tag in conjunction with noscript to refresh the page and notify the server when JavaScript is disabled, like this:

In the above example when JavaScript is disabled the browser will redirect to the home page of the web site in 0 seconds. In addition it will also send the parameter javascript=false to the server.

A server side script such as node.js or PHP can then parse the parameter and come to know that JavaScript is disabled. It can then send a special non-JavaScript version of the web site to the client.