IS javascript good or bad ?
JavaScript itself is not evil, nor are the web sites designed on it and applications that provide a slick, enhanced user experience using JavaScript. What I call “evil” is the use of JavaScript in such a way that it needlessly prevents some users from being able to access the site or application. Means when your javascript can be depicted by users in different ways.
It’s usually not only possible but quite practical to build your slick, JavaScript-powered user experience on a foundation of standard HTML and CSS. This foundation enables you to deliver your site’s content not only to users browsing with JavaScript disabled, but also to automated systems like search engines.
With a little extra thought, you can even make your JavaScript functionality play nicely with assistive technologies, and work well for keyboard-only users.But things start to fall apart when Ajax enters the picture, and users begin clamoring for the desktop-like applications that it makes possible. Often, static HTML/CSS is not up to the task of providing a useful foundation for these apps, and building a non-Ajax alternative would be a completely separate project—probably one that you can’t justify the cost of developing and maintaining. In extreme cases, it’s possible that what your application does simply doesn’t translate to the page-based model of plain HTML.
The solution to this dilemma, in my mind, is to separate these types of applications from the current, page-based Web, and move them to a “Web of Applications” that’s just as universally available as the Web is now, but which is designed from the ground up with applications in mind, and solves all the issues that are currently being caused by our attempts to shoehorn desktop-like applications into a system that was designed for serving pages of information. |
