Designing With Javascript

I started writing a longer post, branched off from this thread lol.

One thing that I seem to always disagree with a few people is pages in a website working even without having javascript enabled.

I think that to a website, its "major" core feature(s) should perhaps work without javascript, but really I don't let it impede my designs. You can make some really rich web applications with ajax/js, and for the small minority that doesn't have it turned on I guess it sucks for them.

I guess I thought, if facebook doesn't support browsers w/o javascript, then I can too!

What are your guys thoughts about this? Is it really that big of a deal if your designing a community sort of site, and not like a "financial" application where its pretty much required?

Facebook is huge enough where they can just shrug it off and not have to worry about that demographic. You aren't anywhere close to being as large as Facebook so you shouldn't conform to what they do unless you can completely say "I don't need their business". Large scale business practices don't necessarily translate to small businesses.

quote Vermillion

quote Monferno

I try to use PHP where I can.

PHP doesn't offer the same interactivity as JS, however.

PHP is server-side, and so gets parsed in (most cases) before page load. JS can be used to change text on a page, etc without reload.

You hate working with JavaScript, Liam? Have you tried looking at libraries like Prototype (with Scriptalicious for animation), Mootools with Mootools More or jQuery? All three offer a different experience.
Protoype is mainly focussed on interactivity (with AJAX/ XHR) and has a robust classes (-like) system like that found in other languages. Scriptalicious can do some amazingly fluid animation rivaling Flash.
Mootools also gives you classes.
jQuery lets you code your own style. Its main goal is to let you "select stuff in the DOM and do stuff in the DOM". jQuery's greatest strengths are simplicity and a large, active community. It doesn't feature 'classes emulation' like other libraries, it uses JavaScript's quirky (but pretty cool) prototype system and a pretty well-thought out plugin system.

Examples:

code

// Mootools $('myElement').addClass('myClass'); $$('.myClass').removeClass('myClass'); // $$() for CSS selectors // jQuery $('#myElement').addClass('myClass'); $('.myClass').removeClass('myClass'); // Native way el = document.getElementById('myElement'); el.className = el.className + ' myClass '; for(el in document.getElementsByClassName('myClass')) el.className = el.className.replace('myClass', ''); // Simple POST request with jQuery: var data = { name:'John Doe', poll_id:32, voted_on:16 } $.post('index.php', data, function() { alert('If you see this message, your vote has been accepted.'); });

My philosophy is: if you have Javascript disabled it'll work, but I won't spend hours coding fallback features which aren't necessary for the core functionality of the site. This is what many sites do nowadays.