AJAX & Disabled JavaScript. Do You Worry?

I'm new to PHP, AJAX, and databases. But I want to know what experiences programmers think and do. When using AJAX, do you worry about users who have JavaScript disabled? Do you h

Solution 1:

They key is to understand the viewers you are targeting. If your site is plenty useful without javascript, then it may be worth the extra effort to make a reasonable experience when javascript is disabled. You would have to understand the functionality of your site and targetted viewership to know whether that extra effort was worth it or not. There is no single correct answer here.

If your site isn't very useful when javascript is disabled, then it may not be worth the extra effort to try to do anything beyond tell the users that javascript is required. Why put in a bunch of extra effort (and a lot of extra testing) if those viewers won't be loyal to your site and be regular visitors anyway because the user experience will be fairly undesirable.

So, the answer is it depends a lot on what your site does, who your competition is and who your viewers are. Though people on SO like to argue with me in this regard (out of the purity of every web site should work for all - I think), it is getting harder and harder to justify the business case for the extra work for making many sites work without javascript these days. It, of course, depends upon the specifics of your site, competition and viewers. In my book, it is by no means a given that you should make every site work without javascript enabled.

If you Google, you can find articles that discuss how many users have Javascript disabled. This Yahoo article from mid 2010 says that they saw .25% - 2% of users with JS disabled.

As for Ajax specifically, there is no like replacement or fallback without Javascript. If you have a design that depends upon using Ajax for communicating with your server, then that design will require Javascript - period. Your only alternative would be to have a non-Ajax design (a more traditional page request from your server with one URL for one static page) that could be served instead that did not use Ajax. If your other design used and depended upon Ajax, this non-Ajax design would be a significantly different design and implementation.

Solution 2:

Just make a container around everything and set the display to none using CSS. Set "onload" to a JavaScript function that sets the display back to "block". This way, only stuff in the "noscript" tag will show when JavaScript is disabled. You can use it to say that your web application uses AJAX, ect. I like to showcase a privacy policy that NoScript users will be happy about on these fallback pages.