Re: Accessible road maps

> Just a quick sanity check - moving forward, the requirement to work 
> WITHOUT JAVASCRIPT is going away in 2.0, right?  And being replaced with 

I hope not, as an increasing number of people who wouldn't consider
themselves disabled will refuse to run scripting, especially from
sites run by people unfamiliar to them.  This is for general security
(as new Windows loopholes are discovered but not yet fixed, the
best practice advice from security authorities (including sometimes
Microsoft themselves) is to disable scripting in the browser) and
because people are using it as a way of blocking various excesses
in web sites, such as popups and intrusive animations.

Basically, when you have a page with scripting, you are downloading
a fully fledged computer program.  Whilst there might theoretically
be sandboxing, it has been proved, time and time again, that it is
not possible to reliably sandbox something as complex as IE and the
Windows ActiveX controls.

The other problem with scripting is that it encourages people to send an
application program, not a document, to the browser, and that application
program typically tries to take over the user interface from the browser,
meaning that users have to learn the user interface for each web site
(this is called lock-in by marketing people and is, for them, a desirable
property - they don't want you to be able to move to their competitor's
site too easily, because it has the same user interface).

If you say that you can use scripting, but not to take over control
of the user interface, then the scripting you are left with is 
generally not necessary for the operation of the site and can safely
be disabled.

There are some applications where a client side application program is
essential because a very high level of interactivity is needed.

Received on Saturday, 29 May 2004 04:52:41 UTC