I have. Links lets me surf without all the flashy colours and blinking GIFs, and it's actually very good at producing a close resemblance of the actual layout using a TTY. And a graphical browser is hardly viable if you're connecting via SSH over an ISDN line's 7.6kb/s anyway. Yes, some of us do.
No offense, but why should a commercial developer developing for a commercial firm feel the need to design to as low of a case as yours? The extra traffic that might be kept by a flashier design will more than make up for the traffic that is lost by a visitor that is using a browser that is too-primitive to view the site.
By the way, at home I connect via a 56k modem, and I use mozilla 1.1 as my browser. ISDN must be luxury ;)
And what about the folks who disable Javascript because they don't want to be annoyed with popups, Geo***tties or Tripod overlay ads and the like?
I don't know about you, but my browser specifically allows me to turn off popups.
Unfortunately, your DHTML menus won't work for 50% of your audience unless you put in a gargantuan effort to develop for multitudes of browser brands and versions.
Incorrect. Netscape lost the browser war serveral years ago; Internet Explorer 5.0+ is now used by over 92% (and rising) of the internet populatation. Please see http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2002/October/browser.php for more info.
Even if it works satisfactorily, the dynamically client-generated information is then out of any search engine's spider's reach.
Why? The DHTML menus that I've seen involve lists of links in divs, that are then hidden, showed, and moved by JavaScript. Theres no reason that a search engine wouldn't be able to follow that.
Does that mean "to hell with the people who use PDAs, smartphones or other similar appliances" too?
No; If you read the article, you'll find that is mostly about not retro-designing for dead, non-CSS supporting browsers (NN4), when the future of web browsers promises to be rich with CSS support. A List Apart has always advocating support for wireless browsers; in fact, that article even mentions that.
Along the same vein, folks with PDAs/smartphones, voice synths, braille readers and so on are out of game. With purely CSS-based menus such as those shown on css/edge, there's a fighting chance that the menu information can be made available even using uncommon media that aren't a mouse/computer screen combo - I want to see you try that with Javascript.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Javascript is a scripting language, CSS is a descriptive language. Don't forget that DHTML includes CSS as well; it would be impossible to implement DHTML menus without the 'visibility' and 'position' CSS attributes. In fact, going the other direction:
<script language="JavaScript1.5" type="text/javascript"> document.writeln(" Your favorite CSS-compliant code goes here"); </script>
Now, if you want me to rant about inconceivably abysmal CSS compliance in just about every current browser, six years after the standard was finalized and published (and several more after it was first talked about), that I can do.. I'm glad Mozilla is getting usefully close - though even it has its issues.
Thats why DHTML menus came to be in the first place. Even a couple of years ago, it was impossible to implement a pure CSS menu like the ones you describe. I'm not saying that there is any excuse nowadays for using a DHTML menu, but there is a reason they exist.
In reply to The Case Against The Case Against Javascript
by jryan
in thread The Case for Javascript
by BUU
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