Should you design websites that require JavaScript in this day & age?

Question

It\'s fall of 2008, and I still hear developers say that you should not design a site that requires JavaScript.

I understand that you should develop sites that degra

Answer 1

Search Engines don't support JavaScript. They're also blind and don't support CSS. So my suggestion to you is to make sure that the part of your product that needs to be indexable by search engines works without JavaScript and CSS. After that, it really depends on the needs of your users.

If you have a very limited subset of users, then you can actually query them. But to remember that 10% of the population has some form of impairment ranging from vision issues (low vision, color-blindness, etc.) or motor functions (low hand dexterity). These problems tend to be more prominent in the elderly and the knowingly disabled

If your site will target the general audience of Internet users then please make it degrade gracefully, but if you can't do that, then make a no-JavaScript version (like G-mail has).