I am considering creating a website that only supports users with JavaScript enabled.
My justification for this is that I want to offer a rich user experience, in a fairly limited time budget, so if I only support people who have JS enabled, I don’t have to spend time making sure the UI works without JS and create server side equivalents for validation etc.
- Is this possible? Do different browsers\platforms prevent me from achieving this?
- What percentage of users have JS disabled these days?
- How would I go about checking if JS is enabled in C#.
Your justification is fine. However, you must implement validation on the server side of things as otherwise abusing your code will be very easy by just disabling JavaScript.
No, making it ‘impossible’ to submit any data without JavaScript will not solve it.
From personal experience I think most internet users hava JS enabled nowadays. The portion of users who may have problems with JS-heavy site is mobile-based users, so unless you need to reach them, it probably should not be a big issue.
The easiest way to determine JS with just a single redirect would be to set a cookie with JavaScript code (document.cookie) and then use the aforementioned window.location to redirect. After that the server should be able to read the cookie set by JS, assuming it’s enabled.
Also, while it’s quite difficult to share validation rules and other logic automatically on both server and the client using tech like C#, I would suggest checking out Aptana Jaxer. Jaxer is a JavaScript based server-side framework which, amongst other things, will allow you to share the very same JavaScript code on both client and server. Very nice if you want to validate on the client, but don’t want to write your validation rules twice!