Hey all,

I tried to find some relevant topics and couldn't find a discussion on my question, which is simply whether it's considered best practice still to design any applications or pages for users with jscript enabled, as well as javascript disabled.

Up till now, I've always designed for both and on the user end will most likely continue to, but I'm going to start an application soon that would probably benefit from using a number of javascript features and so I don't know whether it's a big no-no to take a page from iGoogle or Facebook in basically throwing up a noscript warning that you need javascript enabled to use it.

Naturally I'm sure the answer is I should do both -- to make it as compliant as possible -- but I'm curious to see if anyone can elaborate or has more to add to it.

Thanks in advance

In a ideal world your site should function without Javascript, and the JS is used to enhance how the site works, not control it.

Obviously some online apps do need JS because there is no alternative, in cases like these you need to flag and inform the visistor if JS is disabled, giving them alternatives or options.

If you are making a site/app that requires javascript, make sure people know that they need to have it enabled. You can also redirect users to a different page who don't have javascript enabled and after looking at your log files you can determine the number of users you will lose due to making javascript mandatory. If you're only going to lose 1 out of 1000 people, probably not a big deal but 1 out of every 10 might be.

Also make sure you at least point to how to enable it so that the user can still go through the site the way it was intended.