People without Javascript

[mendhak]

I've often noticed that every guide, book and person in the web design field must pay attention to the fact there are a few people out there who do not have javascript enabled on their browsers.

As far as I've seen, everyone has Javascript. These non-JS users probably live on some remote island made of whale-snot near Papua New Guinea where TCP/IP packets are sent using smoke signals, and the computers actually have a hamster inside them.

Question: In reality, who the hell are these people working with a non-JS browser?

Question: Why do they not upgrade or move over to a better browser?

[Rick Bull]

Usually it's people with disabilities that either are using a text-only browser (e.g. blind people) or are using a graphical browser, but have problems with scripted events such as flashing, etc. BUt also people who are pissed off with pop-ups and the useless crap that a lot of developers put in their sites.

To be honest you rarely need to use JavaScript now that most browsers have a fairly good support of CSS. I just use it for form validation, and non-essential stuff.

You should remember also that if you are in the US and are writting pages for a business/organisation (I think) you can get sued if you don't comply with the W3C's wb accessibility guidlines

[georgec]

Some people turn off JavaScript for security reasons as well.

Regarding the usefulness of JavaScript, in the past, I thought that the more I learned server side scripting (ie: PHP, CGI etc), the less I'd find JavaScript useful, though quite the contrary has happened. JavaScript can be used to greatly enhance the interface and intuitiveness of a server side script, but more importantly, shoulder a lot of the work that would otherwise be a waste of server resources for the server side script to perform. It's a language here to stay, at least IMO.

[Rick Bull]

Yeah it is a great help, and is here to stay too, but I think people will always keep turning it off too Plus you have to remember there are probably more people with disabilities going on the Internet all the time, especially with more accessible browsers like Opera appearing.

[mendhak]

What I gather from your posts is that we have to take into consideration the small minority of people who use disability oriented browsers?

Perhaps it's time that these browsers make an attempt to integrate javascript into themselves. It would be an advantage to both, no?

Some people turn off JavaScript for security reasons as well.

Got any examples of these security reason? I'm only aware of a little 'glitch' in which javascript can be used to execute a file on the clients machine, but that was only in a few old browsers. Got more? What reasons specifically?

[RealisticGraphics]

You can create objects in JavaScript just as you can with VBScript. If a user is not to "quick on the draw" they may click "Yes" on security pop up asking them to grant access to their computer and then all kinds of hell could possible break loose.

For instance, although I've never tried this in JavaScript but the objects are the same, you could create an instance of Word, add code to a VBA macro for a new word document, and then tell Word to run the code. This way all the functions that are not normally available to the scripting environment can access those functions from the VBA environment on the user's system.

Not to mention you could create WSH objects to access the registry. Most of this is easy to figure out just by going to MSDN and looking it up. Heck, the Registry examples install with with most version of Windows & IE (C:\Windows\Samples).

For the most part, this stuff is useful for programmers who use scripting in their day to day job functions, but more and more unethical people are figuring this out and using it in Viruses.

I'd post code, but I don't know that it would be a good idea. As I said, most of this information can be found at MSDN.

[Rick Bull]

Originally posted by mendhak
Perhaps it's time that these browsers make an attempt to integrate javascript into themselves. It would be an advantage to both, no?

Yeah it probably would, but it's not that easy to write a browser that's targetted at disabled people, and only enabling functions that aren't going to give them problems. I think it's going to be a long time until you see one that good. Plus different users suffer with different problems. But like I said before most (at least minor) things can be done with out JavaScript, or you can at least provide a server-side alternative that only gets executed if the user doesn't have JS.

[mendhak]

Thanks for the insight, everyone.

[Rick Bull]

No problems. If you are interested in making your pages a bit more accessible the W3C's WAI is probably the best place to go, and I try to check my sites against the accessibility check-list.