This is more of a suggestion than a programming related article.
The fact is that a lot of developers and developer’s code I’ve come across in the past few years seem to be aimed at a high end idyllic and flawless user who will have a certain configuration, resolutions, browser and plugins available and will experience therefore the same as the developer intended. This is however usually not the case and creating a website that works for some users and not for others is wrong . I could say it’s counterproductive and that it will harm your image as a developer/designer/programmer/professional but it’s easier to just say it’s wrong.
The truth is that if your site becomes somewhat popular you will start to receive visitors from Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari and some other browsers with totally different configurations that include non-flash-enabled users and non-javascript-enable users, users that don’t accept cookies, or those who don’t parse css. My point is that your site should remain browsable and work under all those different scenarios and to do that you just have to keep some simple rules in mind.
What I mean by this is you should design your site for the worst possible scenario and then add the good stuff keeping focused on the fact that it should still work in the worst case scenario. Lets say you want to use one of the multiple lightbox scripts available to show the full sized view of an image. You could set the action with javascript making javascript-less users unable to see the full sized image or you could link the image to the full size and then modify it with javascript.
All javascript calls should be done over a non-javascript code, meaning that if you want to send a form using AJAX you should first make the form work without it and then extend it’s functionality with javascript. This way it will still work for both js and js-less users.
It’s true that on 2008 the amount of users that had javascript enabled was over 95% of the total but that leaves a whole 5% of your users seeing some ugly version of your site and probably never coming back.
If you have a small website that has a couple of visitors per day that’s probably just not worth doing since you will only lose a few visitors per month but for bigger sites that get thousands of visitors per day the loss could be huge.
Thanks for reading.
