Question

Does anyone know a good place to look for basic principles and tutorials on designing a JQuery rich websites, but which would still work in browsers that either don’t support JavaScript or have it disabled?

If that’s even possible, in practical terms..

Answer 1

Before you look at all this, you should be aware of a few things.

Historically, there were lots of reasons to make things work without JS:

• SEO. Googlebot ran much like Lynx
• Mobile devices. Hardly any, if any at all would run JS
• Paranoid users who turn off JS
• Corporate restrictions
• Accessibility – screen readers etc.

If we look at todays landscape, things are different

• Googlebot evaluates JS. In my own testing I’ve found that Googlebot can make ajax requests via jQuery code, and include text inserted into the page in it’s results.
• Mobile devices run better browsers than desktops for many users (i.e. Android Phone + IE8 user)
• Noscript etc allow you to whitelist sites, though hardly anyone uses it anyway
• Some corporations likely still ban JS, but again, it’s minimal
• Accessibility is getting better, and in many ways it’s not an issue, but users may still be using older versions that don’t deal with JS well.

This means that you are making a site without JS for accessibility reasons. This lets you concentrate much more on the experience you are creating without JS.

In short, you should ensure that anything that happens via AJAX can also happen without. This usually means modifying your serverside code so that anytime it generates JSON, it can also create the whole page the JSON is to be inserted into (i.e. if you have a button that loads text into a div, you should have an actual page with that view in).

An alternative approach is to carefully provide a different version of the app targeted at users without JS. Many old mobile sites are “good” examples of this.