Let links be links
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When you're public these issues are important to worry about and also obviously government sites need to be available without a bunch of crazy bells and whistles.
One issue I've noticed is people using onclick or some busted stuff to navigate instead of just regular hypertext references which work better, especially from a browser navigation point of view, and with pushState we don't need to play these idiotic games anymore.
Having said that, even by the article's own admission, about 1% of people have issue with JavaScript, and to me there's no reason to support people that don't have it (unless you're a government site) and I think things like graceful degradation or progressive enhancement are just ways to waste one's time and have a user experience behind others. It's really an approach for the web that is best left in the last decade. You're coding everything twice and at the same time limiting the speed/ability of your web app to please people who almost certainly aren't going to click your ads or make you money.
Things we have which the public sees do work modestly well without JavaScript, though you can't really watch video and other things with it disabled anyway. Our web apps on the other hand only work if someone has JS, though for the sake of proper approaches, easier linking, browser history, etc we do use pushState. We've had one complaint about it, but not from someone who had JS disabled ,rather someone who was trying to be a "consultant" (we didn't ask them to), suggesting that people without JS won't be able to use our site, so we should spend hundreds of hours of extra work making the site function for people stuck in 1997.
I've seen enough people who write JS so terribly that their web apps only work with IE (so weird, like they're using ActiveX, but they'er just really bad at what they do) and so I think we should be talking about writing cross-browser JS more than dealing with people who don't have it.
As long as the approach is correct (such as pushState) then I see no reason to not have a client-rendered site that pulls down JSON or whatever, it's 2015, the web is now the platform, and I don't want to move backward into black text, blue links, and everything plaintext with maybe JavaScript roll overs based on some backward notion that it's bad to be modern and use things almost every browser in use supports. This same approach, too, is the same sort of weird crap I see where people are saying to use margin-left: -999999999px and such instead of display: none because of screen readers, when that stuff isn't even true, and it's a desire to be compatible with people who almost certainly never come to your site.
Many of the people pushing for progressive enhancement don't even have web sites people want to go to, so I don't think they really need to worry about it. They spend so much time trying to find ways to work with 0.05% of visitors that they really provide nothing interesting, useful, or unique to the site, but hey at least the site looks ancient as hell and doesn't use any useful modern features of JavaScript so that's good, right?
Disabling or limiting JavaScript is like disabling HTML5, it's now a part of the web, it's better than it used to be, and to me bitching about JS is like when people say "the Internet is stupid, BBSes were real ways to communicate".
Search engines that matter (Google) are capable of navigating through single page sites and such as well as they know how to render and understand JavaScript.
So what's the reason to still promote this progressive enhancement stuff? It's the same kind of thing where we read about Richard Stallman reading the Internet by wget-ing plaintext then emailing it to himself to read later since the web is full of evil, or when he suggests that "whoever is using the computer should have complete control over it and it's wrong to do otherwise."
It's just ancient thinking that holds people back, but like I said, the people who really spend a lot of time worrying about it don't actually tend to matter anyway. I'm more than happy to provide a very fast user experience and upset 0.05% of people who don't like the fact I didn't waste my employees' time by making them rewrite an alternate version of the app that displays in basic HTML. If I can get one over just by looking slick and loading faster, I'll take it over wanting to follow a make-believe standard my competitors do.
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Not a web developer but, if I can't right click on the links on your site and either copy them or click open in new tab. I consider your website to be poorly developed.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
Not a web developer but, if I can't right click on the links on your site and either copy them or click open in new tab. I consider your website to be poorly developed.
I agree with that, that was what I was talking about with pushState and people using onclick for navigation. I've always hated that, and hilarious I've even seen people do things like:
<a href="#" onclick="document.location='/otherpage.html'">click here</a>And I think, seriously?! SERIOUSLY!?
Keep in mind though, I think most programmers are terrible, especially web developers.
