Hi guys, A friend has asked me to look over her website and give her feedback on the new design she has had done. The first thing I noticed was that the shopping cart is coded is javascript. I need to know whether this will cause her a problem, I know that if you're browsing w/o JS then it won't work. But seriously, how many people are browsing w/o javascript these days? Will it also cause any problems for accessibility (i.e. blind / deaf people etc.) Many thanks for your responses! DoA
10% of users have javascript turned off, such as pda's mobiles etc, and people turn if off within their computer browsers, if you are to use javascript, make sure you have rollback.
javascript should only be used to enhance the website, it should still be functional without it. There is still a pretty decent percentage of people browsing without javascript so it would be pretty bad for business not to have it. Also like you mentioned it could affect screen readers as they dont read javascript so they wouldn't know what's going on ( i don't know how it could affect deaf people though ) if they are going to stick with the javascript checkout at least put a message in <noscript> tags displaying javascript must be enabled
I would like to know where the 5% and 10% statistics for JS being turned off come from. About 3 years ago I turned JS off on my browser and I lasted about 30 minutes because the web was totally unusable without JavaScript.
As a rule of thumb I only use JavaScript for enhancement purposes just on the off-chance that someone could have it turned off... Personally though, I wouldn't worry about it in your situation. Shouldn't be a huge deal.
ill try and dig it up and i'll post it. it wasnt for people having javascript turned off, it was for people who don't have an option of even having it enabled. ie: older browsers, mobile devices, people using screenreaders, and a lot of internet cafe's and companys disable scripts aswell. This is a webmaster forum remember so everyone here couldnt imagine having javascript disabled, but after the trouble with active x there are still a lot of people who don't trust enabling scripts
couldn't find the exact article i saw a couple of years ago but have found a site that tracks statistics here It's a bit less than what it used to be, but 4% of users on the internet is still a whole lot just to plain disregard... if you have 10k visitors a day, 400 are instantly ruled out from buying from you
I would be wary of those figures. I didn't see any mention of just how the stats were gathered. Obviously they couldn't use javascript. So, do they have a dual system? One part javascript and another part tracking requests for the 1×1 transparent gif? If that's the case how does not fetching the image tilt the figures? For the sake of argument, let's say that half those without js also block or don't support images. (I don't fetch images that are not on the visited site, which also tilts the figures.) Let's also say that 10% is a good number for no js. Start with 1050 visitors (This will make the math simpler, trust me.) Visitors without js, 105. Visitors not fetching images, say 50. (Giving the benefit of the doubt, here.) Total image count, 1000. Total js count, 945, or seemingly 94.5%. That implies 5.5% without js. But we know that's not true. What if there are just 1.5%, say 15 visitors that don't fetch the off site images. Now we have 945÷985=95.94%, or 4.06% non-js. In one site I track, the javascript tracking totes the pages served from cache that would not be fetched from the server. I also know that about 25% of my visitors in any period are return visitors, so we can assume they are viewing some significant number of pages from cache. From this we would assume the server logs would indicate far fewer pages served than the js tracker service shows. In fact, the server logs show about the same number of pages served as the js tracker. We can only conclude that 1) I have a higher percentage of first time visitors than thought, and 2) that a lot of the new visitors do not have javascript enabled. We must conclude that the 'returning' viewers do have js enabled, or we wouldn't know they were returnees. There would be returnees without js that I don't know about. (No, I'm not going to parse the logs for that—I don't care enough.) From anecdotal evidence such as mine: Tech oriented and b2b sites will have more js-disabled visitors than consumer sites. Businesses, Internet cafés, libraries, &c. will be likely to block scripting as a security issue. The home user will have js enabled due to ignorance, not being aware that it can be disabled nor any of the reasons for doing so. People using assistive technology, PDAs, cell phones, et al may not have js support. The 10% figure seems a very reasonable number over all. I suspect that the number is higher among qualified buyers on the net. Those being people who really spend more time buying, thus more time visiting different sites, and becoming more critical. cheers, gary
wow nice post gary! i don't really trust the data 100% either but thought it was good as a guide when someone asked for hard evidence.... looks like i should've just waited for you to post first tho
one of the most popular extensions for firefox is noscript. having it installed turns off all scripts in a site. a site that is only usable because of javascript isnt the best site. people with javascript turned off would be confused and will probably never check the site and will never return, unless its a visitor that knows nothing but surfing about computers
To sum up, I think she should alter the site if possible, but it doesn't really make too much difference (for her target audience) if she doesn't