On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 06:13:53PM +1300, James Miller wrote: [...] > This isn't some JS vs NoJS debate, this is JS-only vs Progressive > Enhancement. And for the record, GMail has a HTML-only version, and > most of the other products work, if with reduced functionality, > without javascript. I just tested search, it worked fine. [...]
Data point. After google started adding JS enhancements to their search results page and the JS keyboard shortcuts conflicted with my browser custom key bindings, I turned off JS for www.google.com (shock! horror!). And guess what? It went back to the same behaviour it used to have before the JS enhancements. ON THE SAME HTML PAGE. No loss in functionality at all. See, now that's an example of web coding done right. The HTML provides the baseline functionality, and if the user has JS, then she gets the enhanced functions. Everybody wins. This is how web standards were designed to work, in the first place. And this takes no extra effort at all. The HTML is supposed to express the logical structure of the page anyway, so using <form> and form elements *should* be done anyways. You get baseline functionality for free. Then layer JS on top of that to do whatever fancy effects you want -- which you wanted to do anyway. So it's the same amount of work for *much* better graceful degradation. As opposed to writing the site with JS from the get-go, which has no graceful degradation, *and* often turns out to be much uglier (you end up with lots of JS just outputting HTML into the DOM, which should've just been put into the HTML file in the first place). T -- Государство делает вид, что платит нам зарплату, а мы делаем вид, что работаем.
