Posted by David Dorward on 01/18/07 12:21

aa wrote:

> > Running on the client? Very bad idea. It becomes invisible to anyone
> > without JS enabled, including search engine indexing bots.
>
> 1. The author is talking about navigation, header, footer do not need to be
> scanned by Search Engines. I appreciate that navigation, header, footer can
> be loaded with keywords, but it is considered a dirty trick

Search engines don't need to access the navigation? How are the going
to find the other pages on the site then?

> 2. What is the percentage of non-JS visitors?

Last time I looked at any statistics, I think it was something in the
order of 10%. Usual provisos about statistics apply.

With the increase in the mobile web, I wouldn't be surprised if this
figure increased (Opera Mini is a very nice piece of software, but it
doesn't do JS).

> Are you saying that JS should not be used at all?

No. The key is progressive enhancement.

In short:

Essential functionality should be provided by the server.
Data should be provided by HTML.
Style by CSS.
Then JavaScript to increase usability and generally add convienience
methods to the page.

[Back to original message]