"whitesmith" <ap*******@hushmail.comwrote in message
news:11**********************@r56g2000hsd.googlegr oups.com...
>I know that discussions of handling the user experience of those who
elect not to enable JS go back years, so I'll focus on two sites that
handle it in different ways. First of all, there is http://www.netflix.com/
-- a page that looks great with or without JS. Then there is
https://www.agedwards.com/ageconnect/Login -- which looks like it was
put together by a kid unless JS is enabled.
I've looked at the source for both pages, but I'm new to JS and lack
the experience to see what specifically was done by the people at
Netflix to make their page look so good when JS is blocked. Can
anyone help me with this? Many thanks to anyone who does.
To start, use semantically correct markup. In whatever style you choose, make sure that
your markup lays the page out sequentially. Then you can apply your CSS to it to actually
"lay it out."
The number one thing you DO NOT want to do is document.write() entire pages, menus,
images, et cetera. Which is exactly what agedwards.com does. Just look at the footer.js
for example.
Another thing you can do is provide specific alternatives to content areas. For example,
if you rely on some fantastical JavaScript menu, provide an alternative one in a noscript
tag. Or better yet, use semantic markup, style it with CSS, animate it with JavaScript.
It will look spiffy without JavaScript in that fashion.
Now, about Netflix. I chose them as my DVD delivery guys, specifically because of how
nicely coded their JavaScript was (that is, it did not cause my browser to go ape).
However, they do rely on several aspects of JavaScript style as it were. The menus for
example lose their hover color change (for all browsers), you lose the ability to rate
DVDs, and a few other odds-and-ends.
They could easily use image maps for the stars rating system. They could easily code
links to have a display of 'block', maximize their 'width' in their containers and apply a
background-color change on :hover.
The thing is, you have to balance between what you want to offer and how important some of
these features are. Personally, I think they could do the image map thing, because they
can reuse it for each DVD. The links, same thing, really easy to implement.
Alright, enough babbling. That is my general $0.02.
-Lost