[Bug 10068] Suggest making noscript obsolete but conforming

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10068





--- Comment #19 from Shelley Powers <shelleyp@burningbird.net>  2010-07-07 16:00:19 ---
(In reply to comment #18)
> (In reply to comment #17)
> > You don't need JS for this -- if you're creating a game, you're most likely
> > going to be opening the game in a separate page or space anyway. 
> 
> That's a weird assumption.
> 
> > Before you
> > provide the link to the game, you're going to tell people what they need.
> > That's just good commonsense design.
> 
> You do understand that the game can be linked to from anywhere on the internet
> or even bookmarked?  You still need the "requires javascript" fallback in the
> same response.

And the game page can have a nice block at the top saying what people need to
do to play the game (have JavaScript, browsers that support certain
functionality, CSS turned on, and so on). That is not unreasonable for a game. 

> 
> > Then they can provide a block of text as default in the page to print the page
> > using the print facility, and overlay the block with JS or enable it with JS if
> > JS is detected. 
> > This is the basis of progressive enhancement.
> 
> I understand progressive enhancement!  What I don't understand is why you
> assert that noscript is not a valid progressive enhancement technique when
> falling back to zero-functionality.
>

It isn't. 

Noscript was a component of graceful degradation. Progressive enhancement is
based on the concept of creating the page without recourse to JavaScript and
then progressively enhance it to include JavaScript-enabled options. Based on
this, noscript makes no sense, because it is a fallback technique. In
progressive enhancement, there is no "fallback". If anything, it's a "fall
forward" type of concept. 

Don't have to take my word, look for articles such as the following:

http://accessites.org/site/2007/02/graceful-degradation-progressive-enhancement/

Noscript is a fundamental element of graceful degradation. It is not a
component of progressive enhancement.

> > What Gez is saying, and I agree with, is that the use of noscript is inherently
> > bad by default. It encourages bad behavior, it simplifies bad behavior, it is
> > used by developers as a way of routing around good development practices.
> 
> If noscript never existed, we wouldn't be any better off.  Not providing
> noscript doesn't imply that bad developers automatically will adopt best
> practice.  Bad developers will just do nothing, which is worse.

Actually, I think we would have. People would not have relied on what is
nothing more than a lazy programming trick. They would have had to ensure their
pages worked regardless of whether scripting was enabled or not. 

But, scripting was new when noscript was first added. That was over a decade
ago -- we've progressed in that time. It is a relic of a bygone, and not
missed, era.

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Received on Wednesday, 7 July 2010 16:00:23 UTC