I've seen a lot of very poor web performance sites, but
this one is really standing out to me. You know any
better ones?
On a regional broadcaster's site, I was using my mobile
to look up the area affected by a temporary evacuation
(buried WWII bomb disposal). One would think a list
of street names would be a start, right? Without Javascript,
nothing at all. With Javascript, 1-2Mb later, the page
started to display the first tiles of a Bing streetmap
(vector graphics? what vector graphics?).
Generally, the most common issue with Javascript-using
sites is when they do not work at all without Javascript(*).
One would hope that by now everyone has heard about
progressive enhancement:
1. make sure the site works with plain html
2. make sure the site works with html+css
3. make sure the site works with html+css+javascript
And still I run into sites that do not work at all without
JS - try disabling JS, then try browsing to the presentation
summaries at
http://2011.jsconf.us/
And that is the JSConf site (actually, the site isn't much
better with JS enabled - do they really have a 'render'
button for _not_ displaying HTML as source code?).
If there was an easily visible email contact, I might have
tried that. Instead, there are twitter contacts, which would
require me to register at twitter, log in there, and quite
probably enable JS before sending them a tweet..
Sometimes, it isn't the site author's direct fault: even
otherwise good browsers, like opera, sometimes have
trouble with <noscript> elements (unbelievable, isn't it?).
If your site tries to use <noscript> to achieve graceful
degradation while having functional elements in an
alternate render path via <noscript>, that can mean
that some of your users cannot use your site without
JS (browsing the JSlint group archives with opera 11
and JS disabled, the links to individual posts aren't
in sight..):
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/jslint_com/messages
Although this seems to be a browser bug, the site would
not be affected if it used progressive enhancement instead
of alternate render paths.
There are way too many sites authors who think that
only textmode browsers have JS disabled: it is about
choice, not about "antiquated" technology. The worst
nightmares are community-edited sites that do not
function without JS (github ticket tracking? disqus
commenting system? sites overloaded with externally
sourced ads?).
Claus
(*) From my presence here, you can deduce that I like
Javascript. Still, my default browsing mode is with
Javascript *disabled*. My main reason is security:
it isn't JS that is insecure, but JS is a powerful lever
for turning obscure bugs into real vulnerabilities.
Sites that do not get progressive enhancement do
not inspire confidence that they guarantee lack of
CSS (the bad kind, aka XSS). So those site that do
not work without JS are among the last on which
I'd want to enable JS.
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