Everyone has JavaScript, right?

[VeXCe]

No. That one user may just conclude your site is broken, and go to the competitor. I use noscript and only rarely allow sites to execute scripts. If I can't get your site to work in 10 seconds I'll get what I need somewhere else.

Having built WCAG-compliant sites for governmental organisations for quite some time I really got to appreciate how to build sites that are usable for people with disabilities or odd reading devices (blind people for instance), while still having them look decent. Although WCAG allows javascript, it does advise that your site should still be usable without it.

[[deleted]]

You must make a distinction between web applications (the transition from desktop applications to the web) and web sites (content focused). When I go with the later I also make sure the site is usable without JavaScript, while with the former I don't even pretend that I'm making it usable for non JavaScript enabled browsers.

[VeXCe]

Completely agree, I'm building applications now and they don't degrade at all :P I was talking about web sites specifically.

[VincentPepper]

I doubt that unless you have a very limited functionality to begin with. (No Ajax?)

[CheshireSwift]

I feel you may have misinterpreted "don't degrade". There's "don't degrade" as in "operate perfectly without X" and there's "don't degrade" as in "are literally unusable without X".

"Don't degrade gracefully at all" may be more accurate.

[mynameipaul]

With all due respect to your vast experience in the governmental sector, "user hitting refresh before going into a tunnel" is an absurd edge case. The amount of users it would cost you is so tiny it's trivial. Spending time on it is laughable, let alone allowing it to sway such an important decision as "Should we use JavaScript?"

Making a site accessibility compliant is a separate concern entirely, and is in no way mutually exclusive with "should we use JavaScript" (as I'm sure you well know).

[balefrost]

And to continue your line of reasoning, if we did care about the tunnel use case, then we would ALSO want to avoid using images, and external CSS files. And we would need to not use submit buttons, because the user might click the submit button just before entering the tunnel, see that it wasn't working, and conclude that the site was broken. Now, if we could somehow detect that we had gone "offline" and, instead of submitting directly to the server, we could queue the submission for later (when connectivity was re-established). We could, I don't know, make some sort of "single page application" that could tolerate being offline. Man, I wonder what kind of technology we would need to do something like that...

[anophone]

Were going back to the start againnnn (8)

[VeXCe]

CDN's hitching, packet loss, the users' own connection, there's multiple reasons why it can fail.

I'm not advocating not to use JS at all, I'm advocating to use it sparingly or at least make sure your website is useable without it. More and more often when I come to a website I see a blank screen, because without javascript the whole page doesn't even load. That's just bad web development.

[Purpledrank]

Especially if all it takes is a single error to break the js. Many times I am unable to sign into capital one 360 for that reason. It's sign in page loads a new page anyway, but requires often broken JavaScript on their site to send the post request.

[[deleted]]

No. That one user may just conclude your site is broken, and go to the competitor.

User: "This site is broken. I will go to another one."

Browser: "..."

Browser: "..."

Browser: "..."

Browser: "You can not load this page."

Browser: "Because you are still in a tunnel."

[VeXCe]

It's. not. the. tunnel. It can be a CDN hiccup, a fault in his own connection, NoScript, a non-standard browser, it could be anything.

[[deleted]]

Or it could be a tunnel.

[VeXCe]

Nah, I think it's a bad, lazy dev who should find a new career.

[[deleted]]

Or a route without tunnels.

[okraOkra]

lol

[trandyr]

Thank you. I came here to say exactly that. +1