At the original post: That’s the method I use on lanecc.edu. Though the comments prompted me to check it with no javascript, and it doesn’t show anything. The source is there, but the divs are hidden. We did talk about making sure it was ADA compliant, but I can’t remember why we decided that not showing them when javascript is off was acceptable. I’ll have to check into it tomorrow at work.
Also, people turn CSS off? How?
- I cant figure out why anyone would turn off css , but I figure it could be similar reasoning… a broken page layout makes info inaccessible, the user turns to browsing sans -css… not pretty but at least he can READ the info.
LifeHacker is a site where I get two overlapping windows and if I want to read the one with the article, I have to turn CSS off. I do this through the Web Developer ToolBar, or visit in Lynx.
When trying to test alternate stylesheets, I go to View>Page Style>No style. This disables stylesheets. I don’t know if it disables inline styles in the HTML though.
Also, on the Orca mailing list, I’ve recommended to people to turn CSS off for some sites. Most people running the Orca screen reader have Javascript on, except when they have to turn it off because some script causes constant page-reloading, which makes the screen reader useless.
But one site brought up in the mailing list was using a fairly popular technique: the page had a list of headers (h2’s) with display: none divs underneath. Javascript would show the hidden divs upon clicking the headers. When I moused over the headers, I got a hand cursor, but without Javascript nothing worked. With Javascript on, it turned out it was only listening for mouse clicks. Orca did not see the headers as something focusable (because they weren’t), and so users of keyboards and screen readers could not click the headers to get rid of the display: none setting on the divs.
Since the building of the website weren’t likely to switch from display: none to an off-screen technique, the guy in the mailing list could only see the hidden divs by disabling CSS.
Sad that people actually get paid to write garbage like that. And needless causing other users frustration and distress.
Don’t bother calling yourself a web developer if you can’t build for regular people using recommended techniques.
BTW: I can order stuff on Amazon and do almost everything on LinkedIn in Lynx. LinkedIn has several accessibility issues, but I’ll hold any site in rather high esteem if it works in Lynx. I’m actually pretty sure they didn’t test in it either, but simply made sure the text Javascript used was always on the page, and used Javascript to remove the text until the JS-enabled user clicked something. This is the correct way to do things in my opinion.
For the élite few who are smart enough to use Opera, there’s a button on the toolbar that turns it off with a single click. IE8 and Firefox both have it as options in the menus.
If you enable the Developer menu in Safari, it’s a simple click to disable styles too.
For the élite few who are smart enough to use Opera,
New marketing campaign for Opera:
OPERA: THE BROWSER FOR 1337s!
Some people also apply ‘user style sheets’ that override a site’s original style rather than a straight disable.
I find the 2% number a bit hard to believe – ridiculously low; Either that or new englanders are a bunch of {expletive omitted} who make up 90% of that 2%.
In any case, even at 2% you have to ask “2% of what?”
The answer is 2% of 2 billion people – in other words 40 million people. It’s easy to dismiss 2%, it’s not so easy to dismiss 40 million…
When you kill one, it is a tragedy. When you kill a million, it is a statistic – Joseph Stalin
In any case, the PURPOSE of your base HTML should be to convey the information on the page WITHOUT CSS or javascript. If it cannot do that, you aren’t using HTML properly. PERIOD. END OF STORY – now with people still vomiting up presentational HTML 3.2 and slapping either a 4 tranny or 5 lip-service on it, it’s not surprising by the time people ‘master’ CSS or javascript they vomit up broken crap that completely forgets the PURPOSE of each of those technologies.
But really, if you aren’t coding progressive enhancement so you can have graceful degradation on a ‘normal’ website, you’re probably making dozens of other half-assed decisions when it comes to building your site.
Though honestly, things like “news rotators” just piss me off as a user in the first place – file it alongside other miserable malfing failures at web design like 400px tall banners across the top, marquee tags, and all the other idiocy that makes the ‘sick fad’ rounds every few months and that sleazeball scam artist PSD jockeys prey on the ignorance of nubes with.
Can you tell my disgust for the industry as a whole is back in full force?
You mean Opera users… Like me… Lost count of how often I end up needing information off some broken ass site, and go to View -> Style -> Accessibility Layout or one of the other stylesheets to pitch some dumbass layout in the trash and use one I can actually plowing READ instead.
Some people tend to forget that there are robots who visit their sites too. And these robots also appear in statistics, and are reported to have JavaScript disabled.
Just think a little about it… JavaScript disabled prevents people do even the most basic of tasks, such as watching YouTube videos.
I personally make sure that my sites are functional even with JavaScript turned off.
And regarding CSS turned off… well, I consider this madness, somehow.
Can you tell my disgust for the industry as a whole is back in full force?
Back? It was gone?
Some people tend to forget that there are robots who visit their sites too. And these robots also appear in statistics, and are reported to have JavaScript disabled.
Yahoo claims they accounted for robots and did not include them in their 2%.
Just think a little about it… JavaScript disabled prevents people do even the most basic of tasks, such as watching YouTube videos.
That’s YouTube’s fault: nothing stopping someone with a graphics card and drivers the ability to download and watch a video, but YouTube does not offer that. They also choose not to offer basic text to those without Javascript. You can also log in without Javascript, but not log out.
This has nothing to do with some limitation or magical ability of Javascript; it’s choices made by developers, period.
(You don’t need Flash or Javascript to watch a video in <video> tags from HTML5, assuming you have a UA who can do something useful with <video> and there’s a video available in whichever codec your browser/system supports… plenty of if’s, but also shows how JS has little to do with videos)
And regarding CSS turned off… well, I consider this madness, somehow.
No, it’s Sparta.
Since CSS is to make stuff look pretty, I don’t consider it necessary. Very nice, but not necessary. Since we’re not supposed to be relying on things like colour as sole conveyers of information, our markup should already be doing as much of a bang-up job as it can. HTML is the body. CSS is clothing. In many cases on the web, the CSS is just hiding fat rolls and missing parts. But again, that’s because of developers, not anything intrinsic in HTML, CSS or UAs.
and those fat rolls sometimes have coins in them, just sayin
You don’t even need Javascript to make Flash work. 
And yes, if you’re page isn’t at least understandable without CSS, you aren’t doing very semantic HTML.
If you use just h1-h6, p, ul, ol, li, a, and img (properly), you should have a very legible site with CSS off. Add in even more semantic elements (blockquote, cite, etc), you get an even more legible site with CSS off.
Put everything in divs and you get… GIANT TEXT WALL OF DOOM!!!
You don’t even need Javascript to make Flash work.
Not in real life, but many sites (not YouTube) like to use SWFObject etc.
SWFObject allows you to embed it in a way that doesn’t require scripting:
If you have the Flash plug-in installed, but have JavaScript disabled or a use a browser that doesn’t support JavaScript, you will still be able to see your Flash content
Usually with ten times as many ID’s and classes as necessary too… see the difference between 8k of semantic markup and 80k of “sleaze it out any old way” just for 3k of plaintext and a handful of content images…
As the old rule goes, the less code there is, the less there is to break… and the less there is to overload your server or drive up your hosting costs/needs.
Which of course is where the “but everyone has broadband” nonsense falls flat on it’s face, as it’s not just about the client’s capabilities… and why I laugh at the pathetic multi-megabyte train wrecks people try to call websites, and then wonder why they only get a hundred visits or less a week.
You wouldn’t say that if you were on a smartphone with a tiny data plan … or in canada where they’re implementing “pay as you go” across all ISP’s… or in places like Coos County NH, or the dakota’s were 33.6 dialup is a good day.-- turning off CSS kills presentational images (or should if the page is coded properly)… It is often killed WITH images by people on lesser data plans…
Though turning off just images is much more common in those cases. It’s often easy to forget when living in area’s with population densities high enough to have cheap broadband that there are places where the typical response is “broadband, what’s that” – or you end up paying through the nose for something crappy like Hughesnet.
I mean, where I live sure, for $60/mo I can get 15mpbs/1mbps… but the majority of my neighbors are paying $15/mo for 768kbps/384kbps… and let me tell you, they’re none too happy with a lot of todays crappy bloated sites.
… and it only looks to get worse, not better as in a receding economy NOBODY is willing to pony up the front money to build more infrastructure; as such as more and more people come online the existing infrastructure has to be doled out in smaller and smaller morsels – net result? Hello Canada… Hello bandwidth caps, pay for overages – see what happened with dialup where it started out unlimited, but as the system became taxed the prices skyrocketed and many ISP’s implemented caps with overages. We’re just repeating that again now!
Madness? Madness is not using HTML properly – if you code semantically using the HTML tags for SHOCK WHAT THEY ARE FOR you should have CSS off graceful degradation AUTOMATICALLY for no extra effort!!! – in fact, it usually results in less markup, cleaner/easier to maintain code, and quite often lower bandwidth use with less work involved in actually building your pages.
But of course, in the world of people vomiting up HTML 3.2 any old way and slapping a 4 tranny or 5 lip-service on it… such sensible decisions are outright alien.
Here’s some more made up stats:
99% of anti-javascript zealots can’t back up their belief that ‘loads of people don’t use it’ with any facts, evidence or attributable statistics. :kaioken:
99% of unemotional, impartial, machine gathered statistics from zillions of pageviews disagree with them. :inspector:
99% of anti-javascript zealots believe the methods used to gather these stats are flawed, that no stats gathering organisations like google employ anybody vaguely intelligent, and that only they could program the one true way to prove everybody dislikes javscript :bouncy3:
99% of ordinary web surfing folks don’t care and happily enjoy surfing farmville, facebook and hotmail while unknowingly slurping huge amounts of that nasty javascript over their interpipery. 
99% of ordinary web surfing folks don’t care and happily enjoy surfing farmville, facebook and hotmail while unknowingly slurping huge amounts of that nasty javascript over their interpipery.
Bully for them, then.
But I’m in the tiny ignored minority about whom web developers (most of them at least) apparently don’t care. Because their bad coding and design so often causes problems, I browse all but a very small number of websites with no javascript and a custom stylesheet (if I’m using Firefox) to improve readability.
These people who disable Javascript are one[s] who are techy and if they [see] something wrong they will automatically turn it on.
No. I don’t consider myself to be “techy” (certainly not before I started using the web and became interested in web development) and if I find a significant problem caused by the absence of javascript, I will go elsewhere if necessary, unless it is unavoidable (e.g. for that small number of websites).
Agree, to an extent. =p
Even if .1% didn’t have Javascript, I’d still make my site functional without it.
What you need to remember is that there are five parts to a web page, not just three.
The page author has control of the content via the HTML.
The page author can suggest the appearance via their CSS.
The visitor has final control of the appearance via their CSS.
The page author can suggest behaviour via JavaScript.
The visitor has final control of behaviour via their JavaScript.
Both the author and visitor can attach CSS and JavaScript to web pages and where both are enabled by the visitor their own takes precedence. Most visitors who do use their own CSS and JavaScript will have it apply to all web pages regardless of where they come from.
The only thing that the page author can guarantee will actually be downloaded by visitors is the HTML.
If your web page doesn’t work with your HTML and your visitors CSS and JavaScript then that visitor will blame you for it not working.
I’m getting quite worried about that amount… since the beginning of The Internet, already 2% of the users suffer JS disabilities ?
Since CSS was considered about clothing, 97% of porn websites suggest their visitors to disable CSS to get a better content.
Since CSS was considered about clothing, 97% of porn websites suggest their visitors to disable CSS to get a better content.
Did you miss Naked CSS day? Show your <body>, baby (started by dustin diaz)