Should you design websites that require JavaScript in this day & age?

Question

It\'s fall of 2008, and I still hear developers say that you should not design a site that requires JavaScript.

I understand that you should develop sites that degra

Answer 1

5% according to these statistics: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Answer 2

JavaScript is great for extending the browser to do things like google maps. But it's a pointy instrument, so use it with care.

My bank web site uses JavaScript for basic navigation between pages. Sigh. As a result, it's not usable from my mobile device.

Make sure you're familiar with the Rule of Least Power when considering JavaScript:

When designing computer systems, one is often faced with a choice between using a more or less powerful language for publishing information, for expressing constraints, or for solving some problem. This finding explores tradeoffs relating the choice of language to reusability of information. The "Rule of Least Power" suggests choosing the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose.

Answer 3

There is a gradient between web sites and web applications. However, you should alway be able to say "we are building a web site" or "we are building a web application".

Web sites should be readable down to plain HTML (no CSS, no images, no JavaScript).

Web applications, of course, could just say "Sorry, JavaScript is needed" (which also assumes CSS for layout). Application should still be able to work without images.

Answer 4

Search Engines don't support JavaScript. They're also blind and don't support CSS. So my suggestion to you is to make sure that the part of your product that needs to be indexable by search engines works without JavaScript and CSS. After that, it really depends on the needs of your users.

If you have a very limited subset of users, then you can actually query them. But to remember that 10% of the population has some form of impairment ranging from vision issues (low vision, color-blindness, etc.) or motor functions (low hand dexterity). These problems tend to be more prominent in the elderly and the knowingly disabled

If your site will target the general audience of Internet users then please make it degrade gracefully, but if you can't do that, then make a no-JavaScript version (like G-mail has).

Answer 5

I think Javascript implementations in most modern browsers have now reached a reasonable level of maturity and there are a bunch of Javascript UI frameworks which let you build very attractive Javascript based web applications using web-services and such (regardless of the back-end server platform).

An example is ExtJS - they have got a very extensive AJAX + UI widget framework which I recently used to build a full fledged internal web-app for a client with an ASP.NET backend (for webservices).

Answer 6

I think it comes down to what you're about to do. Are you writing a web APPLICATION? Then I think you're bound to use javascript and/or something like GWT. Just have a look at all the social sites, and google aplications like gmail. If you're writing a webpage with product descriptions and hardly any interactivity, then you can make the javascript optional.