Ping Mitzs

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

I was trolling the Internet this morning and found this collection of free, web developer articles that you might find useful:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Thanks Trip! Save that one. I was reading some stuff lastnight and one of them was never to use javascript for links because it can cause prombles for your users. But it didn't state what kind of prombles. Have you heard anything about that?

 

No. I "hide" all of my email addresses behind JavaScript to prevent (or at least try) spambots from being able to use them to spam me. I don't know if anyone has experienced any problems, but then, I don't know everything either.

 

I'd hazard a guess that the increasing inclination for browsers to not run any scripts unless allowed specificaly might cause such page styles to be irritating to the viewer. I know that I abandon pages found casualy when they appear to be full of scripting like that.

Harry.

 

That makes sense harry but I thought on some navigation bars you had to do though js because css could not do it?

 

To "Java/javascript or not to java/javascript" that's the question...

First you need to make sure you understand the difference between Java and Javascript.

Bottom line is Java is written in "english" and then compiled into "machine language" and run by "Sun Java engine". To change something you need to recompile the script before publishing it or you will not see the changes. You need the source code before you can change anything.

Javascript on the other hand is pure "english", anyone can look at the code and change it if you want.

What is mostly disabled in the browsers? It would be "Java"

Is javascript going to stay with us?
I would hardly think Microsoft will develop their "starlight" system if it is not the case.
Visit microsoft.com and disable your "Java" and "Javascript" respectively. Look at the source code of the page and you will see they call a couple of Javascript libraries to make the thing work.

Or maybe I just don't know enough about "Java" or "Javascript"

 

As harry pointed out users can disable javascript in various ways, also search engine crawlers can't handle it so it may impact SEO.

In reality every website worth its salt uses a fair amount of js so its really a matter of drawing a balance and trying to make things degrade gracefully where possible. Some companies like banks worry about cross site scripting attacks, so won't touch ajax and prefer to keep js to an absolute minimum.

Try not to do funky things just for the sake of it, be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of various approaches. Clean html sprinkled with a bit of css and javascript works a lot of the time, with maybe the occasional bit of flash for media based sites.

 

Anyone any idea what the statistics is for visitors with javascript disabled in their browsers?

I agree with getting a balance between java, flash and all those nice things and the importance of graceful degrading but if you develop a site in AJAX and 50% of visitors has javascript switch off, it hardly worth building an AJAX based site or developing with MS's starlight.

 

I know the difference, and am not inclined to go near Java. This may change down the road but it is not the path I am on.