How many users have JavaScript disabled?(developer.yahoo.com) |
How many users have JavaScript disabled?(developer.yahoo.com) |
I'm saddend (and a little angry) at the number of developers here who absolutely insist it's so much extra work to build a site that doesn't require JavaScript. If you follow best practices, it's not a big deal. Web apps create, retrieve, update, and delete records. No matter how fancy your new startup's idea is, you have to realize that it's all the same task over and over again, and you can do that with simple web forms that don't require AJAX. A little unobtrusive JS to capture clicks, hide boring interfaces, and transform your dull non-JS interface can go a LONG way. Plus you can test that the underlying functionality of your site works very early.
I'm required by law (Section 508) to build accessible web sites at my day job. It's much easier to make Section 508 compliant websites without JS. Then we put the icing on the cake to satisfy the other 98% of our users.
It seems like your zoom software interacts badly with behaviour that's common on some websites. Disabling Javascript seems like a reasonable workaround, but not without cost. I'm curious - why are web developers the target of your aggravation, rather than the people who wrote your zoom software?
It seems to me that a lot of expensive accessibility software copes well with computing circa 1998. But then it hit a wall. Most of the advocacy and lobbying around this issue seems to focus on forcing most developers to adapt to the limitations of this accessibility software, rather than pressuring accessibility software vendors to provide software which (a) delivers innovation and utilizes advanced technology, as you'd expect in 2010 and (b) deals with common patterns in modern software development.
Now imagine I'm surfing as a blind user, and I follow a link from HN, and my screen reader starts reading the page, only to be interrupted by a "take this survey" modal DIV. After a couple of times I'm turning off the JS, cos that's really annoying.
The people who make my zoom software make OSX (it's built into the operating system and it works amazingly well for me except for applications which fire events when I hover.
Following the principles of UJS and web standards makes it infinitely easier, in my experience, to develop web sites that work with screen readers and still use that advanced technology that everyone's gaga over. But if you can't write JS easily that works across multiple browsers, how do you ever expect assistive technology to be able to interpret it correctly? :)
I am open to suggestions :).
If the target is HN type people I'm guessing the number of non-Javascript goes up.
If the website is pure information, why not provide it even to people who telnet to port 80?
But if the website is a rich interactive application, even if it could fall back on simple form submissions, I'd say it's fair that non-JS users sees a "This requires Javascript" message.
(my answer is very different if the "interactive application" was powered with something vendor/platform-specific)
And then there's sites like this: http://partiallystapled.com/~gxti/trash/2010/10/09-javascrip...
You can almost recognize who's mostly in charge for some site:
-- needs JavaScript only to bring me to another page: some bad "programmer" whose best achievement was that he learned JS.
-- needs Flash only to bring me to another page: some "decision maker" who wants "dynamic" or a "programmer" whose best achievement was that he learned Flash.
- needs a magnifying glass to read the text set in 5 pt font: some "designer" who doesn't care for the text anyway. But look how good colors he selected. And everybody has the same screen resolution as it's on his computer, got it?
-- needs a magnifying glass to read the text, the menus are half JS behind images, half Flash: you tell me, but there's higher chance it's made by a West European guy.
etc.
Do you know many people who say: "I won't run C applications because they are vulnerable to buffer overflows."
And I also use Opera, exactly because I can enable using the built in browser settings both JS and Flash only for a few sites where I need it (like youtube).
I have just checked again: I don't have JS turned on for HN. It just works.
Unless your C program takes in input from advertisers and posts from people on the internet, I don't think that's a valid comparison.
Also, you say "very unlikely" but these attacks happen all the time. Most of them don't make the news, but they're pretty much an every day affair.
Very few websites give you a substantial improvement in user experience by enabling javascript.
How many do it unintentional because they think JS is Java(applets ...), or the browser does not support it.
I'm also wondering how many people change the advanced JS settings in the browser (do browser other than Firefox even support them?).
I'm one of those 2% for different reasons(open for discussion): - it blocks 90% of ads, because most banners are JS driven - I consider JS as a privacy and security vulnerability - disabled JS saves bandwidth
It never takes more than 2 seconds to get an idea if a page does work without JS, and another 2 seconds to decide if it is worth it to enable JS.
I'd wager that the average NoScript user has at least two machines, so the total number of NoScript users is probably less than 2.7 million. (http://blog.brandonbloom.name/2010/06/noscript-add-on-instal...)
If you don't cater for those people, put some money aside for lawyers.
I've found that one of the major complaints that blind users have is that it's a total bitch to work with dynamically updating pages. If more developers paid attention to web accessibility, a lot of the major problems to disabled folks would be greatly alleviated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Accessibility_Initiative http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Content_Accessibility_Guide... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508_Amendment_to_the_Re...
I say this as a visually impaired developer with several blind friends and family. To me, web accessibility is serious business.
http://www.dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/dijit-a11y-statem...
I have built many sites with the specific criteria that it work with JAWS. I do not use Server Side web frameworks and my UI logic is implemented entirely in JavaScript. I am an authority in the usability and accessibility field and am hired as such by many of the big boys. JavaScript has nothing to do with accessibility and in fact can be used to increase usability for the disabled. People confuse JavaScript with bad UX design that hinders accessibility.
I think it depends on what content you're providing and which users you want to reach.
I've seen text-only blogs that involve javascript in their visual design and cannot be read without it. I've also seen websites where the site navigation links are rendered by javascript. In both cases the sites are inaccessible to non-javascript users.
In my opinion if you can provide the same content without requiring active scripting, you should. If you're providing an interactive experience that can't be achieved without scripting at least be aware that you're limiting your user base. Even if users have scripting available but disabled by choice, they may decide that your content is not worth enabling scripting for.
I'm also concerned that technical users who disable javascript by choice might not frequent a site like "yahoo" as much as non-technical users. I'm curious if a more neutral but still popular site would have a larger percentage of non-javascript visitors.
That's certainly true for me. I don't care that a site requires scripting, but I do care when there's nothing to indicate that I'd be better off if I allowed javascript.
This is especially true for sites that let a user begin some set of actions (write a lengthy comment, or fill out a multi-step form), and then simply fail at the end because scripting is disabled.
It is trivial to add a "This site requires JavaScript" message. Leaving it out says you either don't give a shit or don't know what you're doing.
"We took a combination of access logs and beacon data (previously included in the page) and filtered out all of the automated requests, leaving us with a set of requests we could confirm were sent by actual users."
I really don't understand what's the big deal about making sure your site works without JS, it's just some extra work that you're going to have to do anyway later down the line (and it will be more complex then).
But if your web page is a complex application, having to support no-JS either shuts you out from from a huge set of interface tools, or forces you to maintain two interfaces in tandem. To me, 2% doesn't justify that, particularly when you can just politely inform the user that their browser has a significant feature disabled, and inform them how they can remedy the situation so that your site works.
Explain to an investor, "We don't have features X, Y, and Z, which our competitors have, because we were spending time maintaining the non-JS version for 2% of our user base.".
The problem with bending over backwards for non-js is that you double your dev cycles (no AJAX, need regular forms for everything), lose dynamic menus (want to duplicate those?), lose a ton of instrumentation you may be doing, etc.
I think it's perfectly fine to say "non-js means you have a read-only experience". Even facebook doesn't go that far -- you can't even log in without js enabled! (And they're definitely in the camp of 2% * 500M).
What will people do who have js disabled? They'll get a tech friend to help, because that disabling was probably a misconfiguration :).
At some point you have to prioritize your time to work on the features that help 95% of your users.
It's worth reminding ourselves that the business and technical constraints of different web applications vary widely and so strategies will also vary widely.
For example, if you are building a greenfield app and your purpose is to try to search for a product/market fit, it generally doesn't make sense to optimize for the 2% of non-js users yet. You haven't yet found a steady source of revenue meaning that (1) you probably can't afford the extra effort and (2) your app's features are likely going to change drastically.
Shorter version: 2x more work does not justify 2%
We snubbed 2% of our potential user base and reinvested the money we saved in increasing the conversion rate of the 98%. Further we are going to use some of that money to chase additional revenue streams. If we exploit all available revenue models and hit a wall with upping the conversion rate, we will look at creating a separate none JS version of the site with reduced functionality, so that the two distinctive development models are not intertwined therefore reducing out maintenance burden.
These are my usual reasons. I've run into a lot of sites with orders of magnitude more ads, fluff, formatting scripts, etc. than they have content (e.g. thereifixedit and related sites typically take me a full minute to load with JavaScript and often under a second without). I don't make much effort to block ads that don't make the page load much slower.
Then there are the NoScript people, who are willing to whitelist your site to allow JS if they think there is value in it. These people skew the numbers but are pretty reasonable when it comes to turning JS on.
Pretty much all of the attacks against Mozilla that might have actually affected me have been mitigated to some extent by NoScript, so it's pretty useful.
I also have scripting off because I tend to be curious about the diligence and talent of the authors at a site.
Wikipedia: JavaScript is an implementation of the ECMAScript language standard and is typically used to enable programmatic access to computational objects within a host environment.
If you want real privacy, then why not just disable cookies? ohhh your login won't work... well then just disable your internet connection then.
Disabling JS wastes bandwidth because you can't do partial page replacements. OMG so much stupidity.
Edit: So many downvoting trolls. Edit #2: Even more trolls who can't even leave a reply.
a) reinforces the notion that you didn't care enough about your message to spend 15 seconds longer on it to write it properly, a feeling which already existed in readers' minds because of the presence of your (poorly reasoned) points, and
b) requires readers to spend longer parsing your comment before being able to comprehend the (poorly reasoned) points you were attempting to make.
I would think you are being generous. A marked advantage of JS based RIA is rapid time to market, it is a simpler development model that provides superior usability when done correctly. The old page post model is a considerably slower development model. Hence all the server side frameworks, people have been trying to crack that nut, in the page post model, since someone bolted up CGI POST to a script and spit out some dynamic HTML.
It's something each business probably has to measure for itself, but the people saying, "I don't see what the big deal is," just aren't looking hard enough.
If an e-commerce site won't let me get to their product list and see prices without cookies and Javascript, I won't buy from them if there are alternatives. There's no real justification for making a simple online store 100% AJAX for even the most basic features, so the sites that do that don't get my money. (They probably don't do to well from an SEO perspective, either.)
Blogs that require cookies and JavaScript before they'll show their content are obviously more concerned with spamming me than being of use to me, so they also get closed immediately.
Of course it would be nice if that "back" step wouldn't be needed.
You could probably also do some clever trick with checkboxes, the css3 :checked pseudo class, and background images to make it work without javascript and without page refreshes. Browser support isn't going to be great atm though.
Shouldn't the referrer tag from the query be enough?
It'd be nice if Apple could turn around and kill the hover in Safari when somebody's using the zoom feature. It'd be even nicer if you could toggle this on and off right now (right Apple button, maybe?) because mouse hovering in the zoom application is obviously _not_ necessarily the same user action as mouse hovering without the zoom app.
"Take this survey" DIVs destroy usability for everybody :(
I suppose it could be implemented as an Applet, but what's important is that Markup.io is exactly the sort of thing that Javascript exists for, really. And yes, disabling JS will break it, completely, and yes, I think that's perfectly forgivable.
On the whole, I agree that my blog should degrade, and data-entry type applications should work as well, but saying that everything should is completely overlooking an entire category of application for which it's perfectly acceptable, in my opinion.
By the way, not sure if you're the author of Markup.io, but it's pretty cool.
Consider GMail. How awesome would it be if you didn't have to wait for its "Loading..." progress bar? It takes 2-4 seconds for that to go away on my computer. If you design for progressive enhancement, you can interact immediately and when JS is ready, it simply enhances what's already there. If done right, it's all the same interface.
If you don't mind waiting, your users may not agree: Google and Amazon both have noted significant losses in revenue at page delays much shorter than 2 seconds.
Well, taking a look at "Basic HTML view"... considerably less awesome.
Instead of making two interfaces, they should make one interface. If JavaScript hasn't loaded yet (or if it's disabled), the majority of the interface can still be available immediately.
JavaScript should always add to the experience. It doesn't make sense to show GMail's Chat widget until JS is loaded-- but it really doesn't make sense to show nothing at all until the Chat JS downloads and runs!
You should be able to show the message list right away. You can start scanning your messages immediately. You can click normal links and submit forms.
Bonus for JS enabled users: a few seconds later the links, buttons, etc. all get hooked up to JavaScript. The Chat widget appears. By the time you click, things may even happen all AJAXy-- and it appeared to load instantly by loading JS in the background.
Now that's awesome.
...which is why JS is filling that gap. :)
It is pretty cool though.
I don't mind waiting the second or two.
I'm pretty happy browsers don't show a big "Loading..." message until everything is loaded instead of painting the page as soon as possible. Shouldn't we be avoiding that too?
The bulk of that interface can be progressively enhanced.
For example, the message list and side navigation can be normal links. When JS comes along, they get actions (show this view, show this message) that override the default actions of those links (navigate to the page /message_view?id=foo).
If you try to use them in those first few seconds, they act as normal links-- they aren't broken, they just weren't enhanced yet. You can start using the page faster.
