Re: ReSpec toolchain...

On July 14, 2014 at 2:47:18 PM, Frederick Hirsch (w3c@fjhirsch.com) wrote:
> is there a law or regulation that requires scripting for the web?

The Web is not governed by any jurisdiction. Also, that wouldn't make any sense: any such law (or the opposite - i.e., that a page must work without JS) would be very misguided and grossly obsolete nowadays. 

There were a bunch of well-intentioned laws around accessibility back in the early 2000's, but I don't think they were ever legally enforced - but they were followed to a degree (though many governments continue to publish stuff using Word Docs, PDFs, and use Java applets... pfff).

> Who enforces this?

Content enforces this. The most popular study of this that I know of is from 2010 (grossly out of date now), where Yahoo! found that only around 1% of users have JS disabled for their properties:

"Percentage of users with JavaScript disabled, by country. United States: 2.06%, United Kingdom: 1.29%, France: 1.46%, Spain: 1.28%, Brazil: 0.26%". [1]

Other sites claim that "JavaScript is used by 88.1% of all the websites." [2]

In a 2013 UK Gov. study [3], they found that for them it's 1.1%. They found that only 0.2% (!!!!!1!one!) have JS disabled. Yes, please read that again: 0.2%.

It is likely that by now that number is even less. In the W3C community, and amongst those that actually read specs it's probably 0.00001%. 

> Isn’t there a lot of legacy of both sites and devices?

Not that I know of (at least, I've never seen any data that). Who is seriously reading specs on an old Nokia?:)


[1] https://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydnfourblog/many-users-javascript-disabled-14121.html
[2] http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cp-javascript/all/all
[3] https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missing-out-on-javascript-enhancement/

Received on Monday, 14 July 2014 19:19:25 UTC