Gov web site doesn't like W's !!!

[geoff]

How about the cockpit?

"Flintstones, meet the flintstones ...."

[Steve Firth]

Looked almost like new, but the driver's seat was highly polished.

No, despite much mud slinging about Ford quality no rust, no holes, no ability to accelerate by running.

[Mark]

Depends what age you are talking about. If you had a old car that was virtually worthless on the open market but was going well you would keep it not sell it.

[Mark]

But they don't work to please the users. The manager demands a 'sexy' website to justify his inflated salary.

[Tim Streater]

While I agree with most of that, you might well want to do something like:

1) first pull-down menu has in jet printer manufacturer. So select one. 2) Second pull-down menu has type of printer. Ditto. 3) Third has printer model. Ditto that too.

Can't do that without javascript.

[Big Les Wade]

Tim Streater posted

What on earth are you talking about?

[The Natural Philosopher]

why you need javascript. I thought that was obvious?

[Tim Streater]

Well its simple enough. You go to a web site where they are selling lots of different products. Someone selling printer cartridges is a good example.

You really want all 1000 different types in one pull-down menu on the web site? No, so you have the fist pull down menu to select the manufacturer, such as Canon or Epsom. That causes the second menu to e.g. be populated with printer model types (inkjet, laser, all-in-one, etc). So you choose one. That causes the third menu to be populated with models based on your choices from the first two. At which point you select your printer model and get a list of cartridges for it.

Now, try implementing that without using javascript on your website.

[Mike Barnes]

Tim Streater :

1) Page has list of manufacturers (http links). Click one. 2) Next page has list of types (http links). Click one. 3) Next page has list of printer models (http links). Click one.

[dennis]

Java, HTML5, the microsoft one, others.

[Tim Streater]

I should have perhaps said "... without using javascript in your webpages".

1) Mostly people run with java disabled, that appears to be the default. 2) I don't know why you mention htm5, that is irrelevant and even if you code your page using html5 you'll still need javascript 3) I don't know which "microsoft one" you refer to but if its vbscript (?) that only runs in IE, AFAIK, which makes it kind of useless. 4) What other scripting languages are implemented in all mainstream browsers?

[The Natural Philosopher]

now do that over a modem..

[Dave Liquorice]

Yes you can, perhaps not with pull down menus so not as "sexy" but the same functionality.

Maybe I should have qualified "work without plugins or javascript." by adding that plugins/javascript should not be absolute requirement to see and use *all* the site content.

[Dave Liquorice]

How do you connect to 'net without a modem?

[The Natural Philosopher]

you know what I mean

[Big Les Wade]

I take it you mean a dial up modem. If you use one of those with today's websites, and if you have JS switched on in your browser, you will sit there all day.

[John Williamson]

Hah! I can do *that* trick with 3G.

[The Natural Philosopher]

well no, you wont. I wrote a site for use by a small company that relocated to a place where DSL simply didnt work. I used extensive drop down javascript driven menus to make it easy to select a product by exactly the same methodology that we are discussing.

It was the ONLY site that had reasonable access time. The company was takingweb orders on another site, transferring them to this system and then booking couriers to ship them. The courier company (no javascript) was 100 times worse.

JavaScript doesn't take up much space codewise and neither did the data. I think in all 16kbytes was the total page size. And that was compressed as the browsers were able to handle compressed HTML. the time to download 16K ONCE was far less than the time to download 8K or so 4 times in a row. And with the inevitable delays in each selection operation.

Its not javascript that slows websites down. Its the use of frameworks written by other people that are all included - possibly from a different site altogether.

I regularly view the source of sites I use when looking for ways to create my own sites. Suffice to say they are mostly utter crap. Full of online style statements that should have been put in a style sheet, full; of unnecessary code, from 3rd party libraries that in any case could have been done better.

Joomla may allow a total idiot to create a flashy web site, but boy, you pay for it in download speeds.

But that's not javascript: its pure bloat in Joomla.

Then add google analytics on top and you can wait all year. And let Google know ALL about who is visiting your site and from where.. Great. YOUR web site, THEIR data to mine.

[Tim Streater]

How exceedingly clunky. How exceedingly 1970s to want to refresh the whole page instead of just part of it. What an inelegant interface. Just the sort of thing to make a customer say f*ck this for a game of soldiers and find another website.

[The Natural Philosopher]

+1

best of all example I ever found was on a website that sells, amongst other things, toothed cam belts and toothed pulleys.

Now you may THINK its a simple calculation to determine , given pulley A with X teeth, pulley B with Y teeth, spaced C distance apart, how many teeth your belt needs

Just try doing it.

or simply use the javascript calculator. :-)

Smart clients - an 'app' in the browser MINIMISES bandwidth. The problem isn't the use of javascript per se, its the conflict between allowing a powerful language to opperate on a client computer, and it being adequately secure when doing so, and indeed pinning the language down tight enough so that everyones browser does the same thing.

It took me days to unravel a bug that turned out to be a feature, in two different browsers. (a problem with casting strings to numbers and vice versa: the specification has a hole in it which is exposed in a certain use of variables: in that context - a logical comparison - behaviour is 'undefined'. One browser decided they were both strings, the other both numbers. Or something. I forget now. )

likewise security issues with JavaScript able to subvert not only the whole browser but also parts of the computer it runs on, are non-trivial.

But that is not an argument against having a programming language in the browser. Or indeed allowing images in browsers or anything else. Even if some people are blind. I mean adhere toi struct guideliens on visually impaired (sorry Brian) and you end up with a series of pictures showing in detail how to change the camshaft of a car, with suitable text alternatives that if they were in any way a replacement for sight, would have been what you wrote anyway.

And again, do we expect blind people to be changing camshafts on cars anyway?

Its about as stupid as still having mommets waving their hands around for deaf people overlaid over some TV broadcasts when subtitles have been available on every channel since 'going digital', If you aredeaf and dontspeak english, then move to a country where what you can read is spoken...if you are deaf and cant read, then just watch the pictures and shut up.

so there are two or three issues in play all being muddled up.

1/. user level perceptions of the website speed and utility are improved by good design, of which javascript may or may not be a feature. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that.

2/. any client side application that is downloaded represents a potential security risk, but again good LANGUAGE design and implementation is the cure, not banning the language.

3/. Political correctness attempting to force ubiquity is in the limit pure Luddite-ism and strangles development of the technology. There will always be some sites that some users can't reach, or vice versa. If that grows to a significant percentage then those people will simply not use those sites. I have for example got praise from I-phone users for the gridwatch site, because the alternative - BM reports - uses flash, and apple don't support flash.

In the end the Internet has never been about enforcing rules. The whole process of RFC (request for comment) has been about engineers mutually agreeing to common standards in order that their products be able to inter-operate. Every single attempt to impose proprietary standards and limit the user base to one technology or another has in the end failed. In the end we design to WORK. And if stuff doesn't work, then it fails to gain traction and disappears.

And design goals do not assume infinite life span or permanent solutions. The HTTP protocol was never designed to do what it now does. In fact arguably it was barely designed at all. It was in inception a way to share and link technical documents. Making very few assumptions about the end users environment.

Today, to make it more powerful, it makes considerable assumptions. Thats been a stepwse iterative process of dreaming up new sexy stuff, and if it took off, turning it into an open standard, and if it didn't take off, or attempts to make it closed happened, it died, Silverlight and Flash are both fading now, largely because they were proprietary. HTML5 is a proposed open standard that will replace most of their functionality with an open standard.

Javascript is a dogs breakfast of a language, but its almost a standard. accept it and move on. Its here to stay.