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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T01:21:25+00:00

I am building a web application that will have a fair bit of forms.

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I am building a web application that will have a fair bit of forms. The html forms are generated using php.

One of the things I came across is this:

I have a drop down box for the user to select his country. Once he selects the country, a call is made to the server to fetch a list of states within that country and populate it in a drop down box.

Initially, I thought I could provide 2 options:

  • An enhanced jquery version where ajax is used to fetch the states and the populate it in a drop down.
  • Where javascript is not availiable, the whole page is submitted to the server and then rerendered with the new states in the drop down.

However, onChange() requires javascript. So if someone where to visit the form without javascript enabled, there’s no way we can deal with the second option, since javascript is required to submit a form using onChange().

What are some ways to deal with this? My only solution at the moment is to just make javascript mandatory. Users without javascript enabled will see a message saying that the page will not work properly.

Some sites:

  • Hotmail.com – Refuses to show anything except a “javascript is required message”
  • Facebook.com – Tells us we should use the mobile version of the site.
  • Google Maps – Does not work. No message to say javascript is required.
  • Gmail – Falls back to basic html.
  • Google account – Does not work. No message to say javascript is required.

Is it acceptable to require users to have javascript enabled at the current state of the web (august 2011)?

Just came across this possible solution:
http://cita.disability.uiuc.edu/html-best-practices/auto/onchange.php

I could perhaps add a button which the user can use to select their country. This should allow us to reload and render the form with the states drop down without any javascript.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    What I ended up doing is to add a button beside the drop down that says “select country”. Users without javascript will see this button. Upon clicking it, the page will reload with the list of states rendered.

    For users without javascript, this button is hidden, and selecting a country will automatically render a new drop down containing the relevant states.

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