Website message overhaul

Nick Sabalausky a at a.a
Mon Nov 14 12:46:32 PST 2011


"Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote in message 
news:j9rs4o$nrs$1 at digitalmars.com...
> On 11/14/11 7:11 AM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> Con: Examples are never visible without JS. There is *no* good technical 
>> or
>> stylistic reason for that. Like I was just telling someone on D.announce, 
>> if
>> you need something collapsible, the way you do it is by leaving it
>> uncollapsed in the HTML/CSS. Then, if you really want JS users to see it
>> collapsed by default, you collapse it *via JS* upon page load. Or just 
>> make
>> use of the noscript tag. There is *never* any reason to do it any
>> differently than that.
>
> I'm not sure what to do about catering for people who disable JS. Other 
> language sites (Go, Scala) do use JS and at least Go is unprepared for it 
> being disabled.

Well, that's not too surprising since Go comes from people in Google. 
Google's been really trying to push JS more and more the last so many years.

> Scala seems to have a designed fallback mode.
>
> A reasonable question is what percentage of people have Javascript 
> disabled. I ran this query:
>
> https://www.google.com/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=percentage+javascript+disabled+browsers
>
> After looking through the top answers I inferred that the percentage is 
> around 2% and declining.
>

Vlad and Adam have already addressed all of this pretty well, including most 
of my main points, but I'd like that add that while even 1% sounds small, 
it's still a hell of a lot of people.

Also, and this is getting slightly offtopic, but I've often wondered about 
the reliability of Google's stats about JS vs non-JS. My understanding is 
that Google Analytics *uses* JS, so I would think there's a good chance that 
many non-JS users are unaccounted for. But maybe I'm wrong.

But even that possible inaccuracy aside, many of the people who disable JS 
do so selectively via NoScript. It's common to have JS disabled by default, 
but then turn it on for certain domains. I'd be willing to bet that among 
the people who do that, google would probably be a very common domain to 
have JS enabled on (even I sometimes have it on for the google domain even 
though I don't like to do so). So that would skew google's recorded "non-JS" 
results lower than they really are.

So then those NoScript selective-JS users would go to d-p-l.org and basic, 
trivial stuff on the frontpage would fail to work. Maybe they would then 
turn JS on for d-p-l.org, too, but it would leave a bad first impression - 
which is exactly what that page is designed for: first impressions.




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