Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 07/06/06 19:09

On Thu, 6 Jul 2006, Chris Tomlinson wrote:

> "Alan J. Flavell" <flavell@physics.gla.ac.uk> wrote in message
> >
> > More realistic estimates seem to come up with figures like 10-15%
> > and rising (for sites that a reader has no particular reason to
> > trust).
>
> For every site I have run, the JS-disabled statistics of visitors
> have never gone above 1%.

Make more of your pages dependent on JS, and you'll be able to
get that statistic even smaller. Does that tell you something?

> > Then there's the search engine issue, though you might not be
> > concerned about that in the present context.
>
> Can you elaborate on which issue you mean?

Search engine indexers generally don't run JS. So any content that's
only accessible by means of JS won't be considered for indexing.

OTOH there's millions of pages (depending on exactly how I set the
search term) which are indexed for haranguing the indexing robot that
its browser doesn't support javascript. I wouldn't want to waste my
search engine credits on that sort of administrivia.

JS has its proper place, for optional extras, I'm not saying it
shouldn't be used: what I /am/ saying is that in general it's a
mistake to make a page or site dependent on it. The last time I
checked a JS FAQ, it said pretty much the same thing.

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