Optimise for the Majority

30 May 2006

One of the primary pieces of advice I’ve seen banded about recently is that when designing an javascript powered website, you should start off with a “normal”, non javascript version and then add the javascript functionality.

I don’t agree.

Of course, if you’re designing a site which utilises javascript to simply add minor functionality – such as using ajax to perform a live search – then this principle is great.

But it’s so limiting.

What we can achieve these days with javascript these days rivals the experience we can achieve with desktop applications, and to try and constrain of web page based on the limitations of users without javascript is incredibly constraining. Now, I’m not saying that we should just ignore non-js users – that would be idiotic – but we need to design the two different interfaces on the content in two completely different ways.

So, for example, in the js version you might use an ajax-powered browser – this obviously wouldn’t work without js, so maybe you need to present a selection of results with a click through to more. With the “non-js first, js second” approach, would we even get to the js browser at all?

Javascript is enabled in the vast majority of browsers, so why should we optimise for the minority?

From: Articles

30 May 2006