Do we still need backup code for people who have javascript disabled? [closed]

Answer 1

I have a different opinion to many here. I don't think you necessarily should care in some scenarios, especially if your website is targeting a particular group of people or that it is going to mean a lot of work.

if you refer to:

http://visualrevenue.com/blog/2007/08/eu-and-us-javascript-disabled-index.html

_{(source: visualrevenue.com)}

You can see that year on year more browsers than ever have Javascript enabled, contrary to the other answers' claims. It was at 96.9% in 2007.

So you lose 3% of potential viewers, so what, your advertising campaign will do a lot more damage than that!

Answer 2

It is not merely a question of whether a browser is capable of executing javascript, but if a user has disabled it for some reason.

For example, you need to be aware of vison-impaired users. Such users might disable javascript, because the effects are confusing their screen reader software.

Answer 3

Yes, we still need backup code for people who have JavaScript disabled.

• JavaScript is often used to do things that break in screen readers (so many screen reader users disable it) or to cause changes to appear out of sight of a screen magnifier.
• JavaScript is still one of the biggest attack vectors to exploit security holes in browsers.
• Add-ons such as No-Script are increasing in popularity.
• Search engines tend not to execute it (so you don't want to hide your content behind it)

I prefer to think of it as a foundation rather than backup.

I understand about visually impaired users, but do people care (harsh, yes) if their experience is buggy?

Nasty people don't.

The law (in many jurisdictions) does.

Not to sound disrespectful, but not sticking to strict standards will alienate people using Internet Explorer 4 and 5 too, but we don't seem to care about them...?

IE 4/5 have:

• a smaller market share than users without JS
• many security holes
• no support from their own publisher

Answer 4

As a developer I no longer worry about 1% of users who turn off Javascript. It is too time consuming and development time is too expensive to waste on such nonsense. AJAX saves an incredible amount of bandwidth which turns directly into $$$ savings, which makes profits higher. If I lose one or two potential users of the site for every 100 users, those one or two lost users will cost a lot more in development than the potential income of they could ever bring in.

Try turning off Javascript and logging into Facebook, it becomes a very broken website after that. If it's good enough for Facebook, its good enough for me.

Answer 5

My recent experience:

My former supervisor claimed, in earnest, that because Google Analytics told us that "87% of our users have Java enabled and less than 3% are using IE6," that we didn't have to worry about supporting older browsers or users with JavaScript disabled.

Problem 1: Java is not JavaScript.

Problem 2: In order for Google Analytics to track a hit, the browser must have JavaScript enabled because the GA interface is a JS include. GA is not, and can not, be aware of users with JS disabled, which can potentially severely skew its reports.

Problem 3: one of our biggest customers requires that all engineers use IE6 with JS disabled.

Problem 4: The boss (at the time) didn't know how to read analytics reports.

If you want to know how important this support is to your business, a good place to start is the IIS logs. Just about everything related to the browser caps is stored by IIS. I regularly import the logs into SQL Server and run some basic reports from my admin site, which come in handy every time someone starts suggesting that we go crazy with the jQuery BS.

If you decide to start building complicated, script-dependent interfaces, be sure that your interface degrades gracefully and doesn't remove required functionality if JS is disabled.

Answer 6

All the other questions got most of the points covered, but I'll chime in with this: it's not a big deal to have your page(s) degrade gracefully in the absence of javascript. If you've got some super-whizzy ajax-infested real-time comet style app that really isn't going to work without javascript, you should at least render a nice message to the effect that javascript is required.