Hello, I have been coding some applications. Do you think its okay and perfectly legit to code Javascript dependant control panels for the back end administration area for an application? The front end had Javascript too but nothing that makes the site dependant on it. I want to know if you think its acceptable to have to have javacript enabled. I use it for tabbed windows to maximise space, changing the action of form depending on which button is press (either POST to self or POST to a different page)
I think it is ok for the back end. But make sure that you use cross browser javascript (if possible some javascript library). Or else something unintented may happen. For important operations like deleting database entires etc, make enough serverside check to ensure that the action was not triggered by a client side failure. For example, older versions of opera did not allow the changing the url in the onclick event of a anchor tag. This is really useful for prompting for a userinput like 'Are you sure, you want to delete the files?'. But the unsupported versions of opera will go to the original url specified in the anchor tag even if you changed the href depending on the user response, which may be highly disasterous. Also it would be better to alllow the admin to acess a less dynamic admin panel with only the most important and basic features, even if javascript is not supported. Only fully supported browsers should be allowed to access the advanced version. Others should be automatically redirected to the low profile version.