Aaron Gustafson (who is a helluva nice guy, and super smart to boot) has a nice piece on ALA which deals largely with sites that require JavaScript. Aaron seems to advocate that one should never require JavaScript in their web app, but rather use it only as an enhancement to improve the UI for that visitors with JavaScript enabled (and this, coming from a JavaScript guy).
I don’t quite agree with Aaron here. I believe there are cases where it’s fair to require JavaScript in a web app. We make all kinds of techniqual requirements for desktop apps (you must have x amount of RAM, you must have such-and-such video card, etc.) , and I don’t see why it should be any different online.
That having been said, we should only make these requirements in cases where the app simply isn’t possible with them — which is definitely not the case in the examples Aaron uses in the article.
Overall, I agree with the sentiment that we should always try to make our apps work without JavaScript. But, I also think there are cases where that simply isn’t possible.
001 // Deryck Hodge // 03.28.2007 // 9:06 AM
I would completely agree with you here, Jeff. Like you say the point is valid for the example in the article, but I think it’s unwise to generalize from that.
There is a big difference between a site that is consumer or content driven and a site where behavior is key to user experience. Granted, sites abuse JavaScript all day long, but if you wanted to build something like Google Maps or Gmail at a site where your resources didn’t allow you to build a matching non-JavaScript powered version, I think “requiring” JavaScript is fair.
002 // Steven // 03.31.2007 // 2:34 PM
It’s hard to justify saying that you should never require JavaScript.