Posted by Andy Dingley on 06/28/07 10:22

On 28 Jun, 08:38, Chaddy2222 <spamlovermailbox-sicur...@yahoo.com.au>
wrote:

> Hmmm, yes I had a read of that. It sounds good although one thing I am
> not sure of is how exactly they want developers to make javascript and
> such content accessible without placeing items in a <noscript> tag,

<noscript> never really worked, was never really appropriate, and was
almost never used correctly.

The basic rule for JavaScript on Web 1.0 pages is that it should never
be necessary. use it for rollovers, decoration, gimmickery etc. but
lay off using it for the core function. In these cases, you don't need
to dupe it into <noscript> at all.

There are very few cases where JavaScript can be replaced by
<noscript>. If you're using client-side JavaScript to generate
content, then it's usually simply better to do this server-side
anyway. You might (in WCAG world) have to do just this to populate the
<noscript> that you'd be better off avoiding the need for altogether.

Web 2.0 is different. If you're AJAXing your content into place with
asynch loads, then there's just no way to replace that with any sort
of static notice in a <noscript>. The fix here is to fall back to a
Web 1.0 implementation instead, with lots of <form>s, page submissions
and round-tripping the whole page back to the server. This gets
really messy to try and cover both patterns on a single page, so
you're often better doing it as two separates.

There's never a need to make any _page_ accessible -- it's always an
alternative to offer an accessible page _in_addition_. Although good
CSS techniques make this costly process unneccessary for general
design work, it can be a reasonable approach when you're doing AJAX
and similar work.

If you're going this deeply into things, you really need to be using
an MVC pattern too. You'll maybe build it without, but you wouldn't
want to maintain it afterwards.

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