I am currently building a new style ecommerce shopping cart to test various scenarios and get the best conversion rates. Alot of this will be Javascript based.
So I am trying to establish whether we are now in a time where we can simply say we happy to drop support for people with javascript turned off?
Thanks for your help help and advice in advance.
That is a personal/company decision that needs to be made for each specific site based on the target audience.
For example, if you are selling computer hard-ware, chances are you wont have idiots running stupid browsers with stupid settings.
I personally require JavaScript for my backend systems and allow JS degradation on frontends.
I would say the majority of folk nowadays would have it enabled. So its really based on whether you think the minority are worth the effort to develop a non-javascript solution.
Look at your stats!
See how many of your users have javascript enabled, crunch the numbers and decide if you can afford to lose them.
If this is a public facing site, you should try and have some functionality that works - i.e. it should degrade gracefully. If you have a link that opens up a light window via script, for not script users, it'd be good if that link actually browsed them to a new page - this isn't so hard to do.
I, as a person who lives happily with Noscript addon for Firefox, advise you to put a warning in a <noscript> tag for us noscripters, telling that your site relies heavily on Javascript. This will do the trick. It is not ok to forget about us, because there are lots of us paranoids out there, but we know how to turn javascript on, so you just need to be gentle with us, and everybody will be happy.
UPD: Just copy the StackOverflow's own <noscript> solution to your site, and it will be enough :)
People do occasionally have js turned off. From a commercial perspective, you can probably ignore these people, unless for some reason they happen to be highly correlated with your target demographic...
However you should ensure that the basket/functionality/style/design etc degrades nicely in absence of js.
Would a business owner want to turn away 10% of their customers? Or refuse 10% of their potential sales? Or simply throw away %10 of their income?
The answer is an easy NO. This is an ecommerce application and it's goal, because it is the goal of the application's owner, is to make money. Not turn it away.
Yes you can ignore those users. The web has always been scriptable and is more so now, and in the near future, than ever before. People who turn js off know what they've done and understand there may be issues with sites because of it. If they know how to turn it off, they know how to turn it back on. Despite all the older articles about this question (and what if they have CSS turned off?), it's just that. From days gone by.
While there may be statistics showing 2%, or 5%, or whatever percent, have js turned off, these are not typical users who visit ecommerce sites on any regular basis and would be surprised if it didn't work for them. It is no longer reasonable for any user to think they can work with such sites without it.
Therefore, with all the ecommerce sites I am contracted for, javascript is considered a given and we have never had any complaints and I never expect any. This is the modern web.