Javascript is too powerful to turn for any random web page. It is only
essential for web pages because people write their web pages to only
work with javascript.
Hmm... I respectfully disagree. It is so powerful that it is impossible
to ignore when implementing a sophisticated app. And it is not
dangerous to the user so long as they have a popup blocker.
Commercially, I can ignore the people who turn it off, and I can gain a
huge benefit from knowing that 95% of people have it turned on, because
it gives my users a hugely better experience than the equivalent XHTML
only page (which I deliver, and which works, but which is a fairly
depressing experience compared to the JS enabled version).
It is _amazing_ how much crud you can take out of a page if you let JS
do the dynamic stuff (with CSS still in full control of the styling).
Nice, clean, semantically sensible XHTML, that can be transformed for
multiple devices - it's great.
An example:
<a class="preview_link">/previews/foo.wmv</a>
But we want it to appear in a popup when viewed in certain devices....
Easy - Attach an 'onclick' event handler (or just set the target
attribute) when the device has a suitable screen & media player, but
leave the markup clean for the rest of the world.
