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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T16:57:03+00:00

So I was thinking a simple way to deal with javascript being disabled by

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So I was thinking a simple way to deal with javascript being disabled by the browser would be the following:

<head>
        <title>JavaScript Test</title>
        <noscript>
                <meta http-equiv="Refresh"
                        content="1;url=nojs.html" />
        </noscript>
</head>

And having the nojs.html have something like:

<p>Return to <a href="jstest.html">test</a> after enabling javascrpt.</p>

At the crash page.

This isn’t my preferred method, but it’s nice and simple until something more graceful can be worked out for users without javascript.

However, it is not valid to put a <noscript> element in the head section. The preliminary tests worked anyway, of course, but I’m superstitious when it comes to my code being valid, plus I’d hate for this to actually fail a field test.

So is there a valid way to do this? Perhaps wrapping the noscript in another element, like an object tag? Or some even simpler way I’m not thinking of?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I am not sure why you need to redirect to another page instead of just showing a message. I use JS and a little CSS to handle these situations for me. Something like this:

    <head>
   ....
   <script type="text/javascript"> document.documentElement.className += " js"</script>

   <link rel="stylesheet" type='text/css' href="css/layout.css" media="all" />
</head>
<body>
    <div id="noscript">Please enable JavaScript, then refresh this page. JavaScript is required on this site</div>
    <div id="wrapper">
       ...
    </div>
</body>

    Then in layout.css:

     #wrapper      { display: none  } /* Hide if JS disabled */
 .js #wrapper  { display: block } /* Show if JS enabled */
 .js #noscript { display: none  } /* Hide if JS enabled */

    By doing it this way, the class is applied to the html element before the page is rendered so you won’t get a flicker as the non-JS content is swapped out for the JS content.

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