At 07:53 PM 6/11/2006, jekillen wrote:
I force the user to have javascript enabled
Oops.
Unless you're working IT in a penal colony, I suspect that what you
really mean is that you choose to serve broken pages or no content at
all to users who don't have JavaScript enabled, whether by choice or
network requirement or software availability.
It's an interesting decision, excluding browsers with JavaScript
turned off. I can see making it in cases of specialty audiences,
such as the aforementioned penal colony, customized intranets, and
others where all of the user agents are not only predictable but
legislatable. For public websites, I feel we need to set barriers to
entrance only when necessary -- and when is that? -- consciously and
deliberately, focusing not so much on "Look at the cool things we can
do with JavaScript!" but "Whom shall we exclude from this
site?" Look a user in the eye, say, "You can't come in," and reflect
on how cool that is.
Although I still love to write client-side script, most of the energy
I used to expend on JavaScript I now devote to PHP. The server is
the great leveler of the playing field, rendering our pages
accessible to all user agents *if* our designs are sufficiently
clever. These days I mostly add JavaScript to perform functions that
are already performed server-side by PHP, purely for the advantage of
speed, but my best pages perform perfectly with JavaScript turned off.
Aside, the whole client-side/server-side debate depends on today's
internet connection response time being as slow as it is. In a few
years a seemingly sexy technology like Ajax, which appears useful
today in pages so heavy with content that whole-page reloads seem
onerous, will be one of the unbelievable jokes of yesteryear, like
RAM measured in kilobytes, 8" floppy discs, and punch cards.
Regards,
Paul
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