Do we still need backup code for people who have javascript disabled?

Question

I hear about it a bit in tutorials that I watch, that certain things won't work if javascript is disabled. Occasionally I see workarounds.

The question is, are these relevent? I can't imagine anyone not having a javascript enabled browser nowadays, except the most ancient of phones, and chances are your page won't render on them properly anyway.

Do people still bother to write backup code for javascript being disabled?

Edit: As a test, I turned javascript off. Facebook doesn't work.

Edit: I understand about visually impaired users, but do people care (harsh, yes) if their experience is buggy? Not to sound disrespectful, but not sticking to strict standards will alienate people using Internet Explorer 4 and 5 too, but we don't seem to care about them...?

Edit: Saying that people should do it seems like a very automatic response, considering how many people use JQuery and other groovy addon libraries.

Edit: I tried a bunch of fortune 500 sites, and so far about 70% of the ones I tried have broken

Dell
Walmart
Fedex
Intel
Coca Cola

Answer 1

Yes, we still need backup code for people who have JavaScript disabled.

• JavaScript is often used to do things that break in screen readers (so many screen reader users disable it) or to cause changes to appear out of sight of a screen magnifier.
• JavaScript is still one of the biggest attack vectors to exploit security holes in browsers.
• Add-ons such as No-Script are increasing in popularity.
• Search engines tend not to execute it (so you don't want to hide your content behind it)

I prefer to think of it as a foundation rather than backup.

I understand about visually impaired users, but do people care (harsh, yes) if their experience is buggy?

Nasty people don't.

The law (in many jurisdictions) does.

Not to sound disrespectful, but not sticking to strict standards will alienate people using Internet Explorer 4 and 5 too, but we don't seem to care about them...?

IE 4/5 have:

• a smaller market share than users without JS
• many security holes
• no support from their own publisher

Answer 2

Yes. Especially when it comes to 508 and WCAG compliance. While the technologies to create accessible JavaScript are coming out of their infancy (see ARIA), developer's should still be coding sites in a way the does not require JavaScript.

http://www.w3.org/WAI/aria/faq

http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/

Answer 3

It is not merely a question of whether a browser is capable of executing javascript, but if a user has disabled it for some reason.

For example, you need to be aware of vison-impaired users. Such users might disable javascript, because the effects are confusing their screen reader software.

Answer 4

I have a different opinion to many here. I don't think you necessarily should care in some scenarios, especially if your website is targeting a particular group of people or that it is going to mean a lot of work.

if you refer to:

http://visualrevenue.com/blog/2007/08/eu-and-us-javascript-disabled-index.html

You can see that year on year more browsers than ever have Javascript enabled, contrary to the other answers' claims. It was at 96.9% in 2007.

So you lose 3% of potential viewers, so what, your advertising campaign will do a lot more damage than that!

Answer 5

All the other questions got most of the points covered, but I'll chime in with this: it's not a big deal to have your page(s) degrade gracefully in the absence of javascript. If you've got some super-whizzy ajax-infested real-time comet style app that really isn't going to work without javascript, you should at least render a nice message to the effect that javascript is required.

Answer 6

My recent experience:

My former supervisor claimed, in earnest, that because Google Analytics told us that "87% of our users have Java enabled and less than 3% are using IE6," that we didn't have to worry about supporting older browsers or users with JavaScript disabled.

Problem 1: Java is not JavaScript.

Problem 2: In order for Google Analytics to track a hit, the browser must have JavaScript enabled because the GA interface is a JS include. GA is not, and can not, be aware of users with JS disabled, which can potentially severely skew its reports.

Problem 3: one of our biggest customers requires that all engineers use IE6 with JS disabled.

Problem 4: The boss (at the time) didn't know how to read analytics reports.

If you want to know how important this support is to your business, a good place to start is the IIS logs. Just about everything related to the browser caps is stored by IIS. I regularly import the logs into SQL Server and run some basic reports from my admin site, which come in handy every time someone starts suggesting that we go crazy with the jQuery BS.

If you decide to start building complicated, script-dependent interfaces, be sure that your interface degrades gracefully and doesn't remove required functionality if JS is disabled.

Answer 7

It depends on your audience and type of website.

For instance, a graphic artist portfolio will not be visited by blind people or people using text browsers. So in that case it's not so important to build nice degradable JS, expecially because it will most probably be used for graphic effects.

If, on the other hand you're developing a news website and you decide (for whatever reason) to dynamically load your news with JS then you should definitely make it degradable. Also, remember that the spiders of indexing engines may have difficulties in indexing content loaded with JS in your page.

At the end of the day, in most cases it's not so difficult to program the site so that it works without JS. If you're retrieving content dynamically you already have the server-side code to load the content, you just need to accomodate how the page is called. Same thing for forms, you can send the content via AJAX or via a normal POST, the backend will be pretty much the same, so it's again easy to implement.

Of course, the problem is not even posed for JS code that is purely graphical.

Answer 8

Support for JavaScript-disabled web sites a nice thought, but not of much help, and of questionable value, IMHO

It is almost impossible to design a robust website without java script, and those that disable JS, for whatever reason, probably don't expect much of a user experience. So if you are coding for that 1% of the population, you have no choice. But for the majority of us, it is a given that JS is there. Accessibility is a different issue, with its own challenges. When I was doing web sites for Hewlett-Packard, they had to meet strict accessibility standards, and it was tough to create anything more than very basic web pages. I wouldn't wish that on anybody.