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Using NoScript, I see a lot of sites that don't gracefully handle disabled javascript, but the click handling for the "Newest Accessories Toys ..." js links has to be one of the worst.

Before you dismiss me as another NoScript crank, think about this:

If you ran an A/B test and eked out a 5-10% conversion improvement for that test, would you be happy? Of course you would. It would be a small improvement, but an improvement nonetheless. Not gracefully handling the 5-10% of visitors with javascript disabled is just like that A/B test, but in reverse.




I've heard 5%, 10%, occasionally 15% many, many times, I've never heard a verifiable source.

The most recent number I can find is 2008 and that's at 5% with a downward trend: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Or ~2% in 2007 at http://visualrevenue.com/blog/2007/08/eu-and-us-javascript-d...

I don't think that number is going anywhere but down, no matter how many of your hacker friends are running noScript.

Sure you can argue you're losing x% of your possible conversions due to needing JS but you cannot quantify what percentage you gain by having a distinctly more fluid/exciting website or the cost of the features/polish you don't do because you're developing handling for no-js scenarios. Personally I'm a fan of graceful degradation in all but the most appish sites but at this point no-js is almost as edge-case as no-css.


I wasn't trying to imply that that a site had to accommodate disabled javascript, Sites should handle it gracefully though. It doesn't take that much effort to at least add something like <noscript>This site requires javascript.</noscript>.

BTW, I just revisited it and they fixed the previous problem. Earlier, if you clicked one of the js links you would get text page of raw html.


Try using twitter.com without javascript enabled. You can't even post a tweet; even though it's just a text field with a button, the button does nothing! Twitter is one of the sites I really want javascript disabled on. I don't want to be involved in their latest JS worm.




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