Question

I know from an historical perspective that it has always been frowned upon to not gracefully degrade when a visitor with Javascript disabled visits a site but how relevant is this now?

I’m asking since an application I’m building is going to make heavy use of Javascript for charting and user interaction with the charts.

Most of the most popular sites on the web are rendered more or less useless without it enabled. I can’t even login to twitter without it enabled, core bits of Facebook stop working and trying to visit Google maps just redirects to their search home page.

The kind of interaction I’m planning would be next to impossible to do any other way, and even if there was a way there isn’t the resources to develop two versions of things.

The problem I have is that the site also needs to be as accessible as possible. It’s an inherently visual site which makes this problematic to say the least. I’m not even sure there is a solution to this particular problem. If it’s visual it’s not going to be suitable for blind people.

Answer 1

This depends entirely on your needs and what you want your demographic to be. A lot of sites use exclusively flash to silverlight; does that make them poorly designed? No. All it means is that the site caters to a very specific audience.

As long as you are accepting that there may be a (albeit) small populous that aren’t going to use the site (or can’t due to missing support) then it’s fine.

Side-note: there are other means of conveying graphics other than javascript. Using server-side image generators is one way. You may also decide to use flash/silverlight plugins or activeX/applets. My advice would be to design the site as you see fit.

I would bet that the amount of javascript support these days is in the majority, so creating the site first then working on the discrepancies later wouldn’t be a bad avenue. Youre still going to receive a high saturation of visitors just on the assumption that most clients support it.

Heck, look at sites using html5–it’s not a standard, and no browser has to support it, but this still doesn’t stop people from taking advantage of article, header & footer elements. Granted, there is html5shiv to gracefully down-grade it, but even that depends on JS being present.