Primenet web design

[Madpoo]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

...
FYI, the smartmenu plugin had a discussion about pure CSS fallback:
SmartMenus CSS fallback

Sigh...

...

I added in the pure CSS fall through suggested in that post. It works now with JS disabled.

Although I'm feeling pranksterish and it occurred to me I should make the color scheme "puke green" or something for those people. Maybe mustard yellow text on a cyan background. Whaddya think?

Also, if you have JS disabled, the nice table layout plugins I'm testing will probably render horribly. I haven't tried it myself, but I can just imagine the table being all unstyled and busting out super-wide past the right edge. Oh well. The data will still show up so I'll call that a successful no-javascript fall through even if it's ugly.

[Mark Rose]

Originally Posted by kladner

I rather think it does. Am I misunderstanding your statement?

I'm using the Chrome version of NoScript. Firefox is horrendously slow on Linux in comparison.

[retina]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

So, I have to ask... is disabling javascript entirely something you do out of an abundance of security? Should I ask what you know that we don't know? :)

Sure, I guess it is security. But really it is just that I don't like the idea of someone else controlling my computer. It's my computer so keep yur steenkin' code off of it, you punk.

Originally Posted by Madpoo

If it's a problem, I can put a section in the header that detects lack of javascript support and shows a message that says "Hi Retina". :) Because it's probably only you. LOL

That would be awesome. I wanna see that.

[kracker]

Originally Posted by retina

Sure, I guess it is security. But really it is just that I don't like the idea of someone else controlling my computer. It's my computer so keep yur steenkin' code off of it, you punk. That would be awesome. I wanna see that.

I'm curious too. Links of that?

EDIT: If you're saying/really mean javascript controls your computer... then I don't know what kind of life you do have on the computer, lol.

[Madpoo]

Originally Posted by retina

Sure, I guess it is security. But really it is just that I don't like the idea of someone else controlling my computer. It's my computer so keep yur steenkin' code off of it, you punk.

Well, I guess that's one way to look at it.... You do understand that websites aren't typically downloading a JAR file to you and asking you to install it, right?

It's just in-page stuff... it'll interact with the DOM and be able to modify things on the page you're viewing, but unless it's a bug in the engine it's not going to be able to do more than that.

Any particular reason you're still on FF 3.6.x? I'd imagine you could still upgrade to a newer version and still disable Javascript, but then boom you've got support for all the standard features introduced in the past 5-6 years. We're talking no more weird CSS extensions like -moz- or -webkit-

My only real exposure to this in the real world is overhearing our web devs and UI team (they're the ones who do all the styling and are CONSTANTLY encountering compatibility issues). There's an audible sigh of relief when a decision is made to no longer support browser X on version Y because it's usage dropped below some threshold. It means hundreds of lines of CSS hackiness can be removed and they can finally feel safe to upgrade some things without worrying they'll break it for IE7 or some other silliness.

When it comes to browsers with javascript disabled, we honestly don't even bother ourselves on whether they have a good experience or not. It's a business decision. We're not at the point where we throw out a page that says "Install Javascript" and that's it, but it really won't look good and most features won't work at all. We do add a little warning box that says:
"This site requires a Javascript-enabled browser, for more instructions click here."

The page it links to has some really helpful instructions on how to enable Javascript for IE 6/7, Firefox 1.x, Safari 1.x. See where I'm going there? It's instructions from 2008 for browsers we don't support anymore anyway. :)
---------------
EDIT: I thought of some examples of where Javascript is a big benefit over any pure CSS stuff.

Tables: column sorting and resizing. There are even table plugins that let you search and narrow the content. C'mon! How cool!

Theming: Changing themes at the click of a button (I don't *think* that can be done any other way/pure CSS or HTML)

Tracking: We all love to hate it, but without the stats from Google Analytics I'd have no way to get advanced browser stats like browser width/height and feature support. VERY useful for someone designing a site.

[Madpoo]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

Well, I guess that's one way to look at it.... You do understand that websites aren't typically downloading a JAR file to you and asking you to install it, right?

It's just in-page stuff... it'll interact with the DOM and be able to modify things on the page you're viewing, but unless it's a bug in the engine it's not going to be able to do more than that.

Oh, and while I'm at it, I'll add that trusting .js files from the jquery library should be pretty safe. I was a bit alarmed a couple days ago that the jquery.com site got hacked, but they *insisted* that the repository was still safe. I don't care, I pointed the mersenne.org site to the asp.net CDN http://www.asp.net/ajax/cdn.

The Jquery CDN itself is REALLY slow (I think it's AWS which is not that great for speed) and anyone using it for anything but bleeding edge versions of Jquery are only hurting their site performance.

Unless you were to claim that Jquery is potentially harmful and could "haxor your box".

And ultimately, the only way to really secure your machine is by unplugging it from the network. Even then, hardware hacks exist. Unplug the power and you'll have a totally secure system that is also totally useless, representing that far end of the bell curve.

[retina]

So a lot of comments about how a site looks bad, isn't cool or won't have feature X without JS. So my counter to that is I don't care. Your arguments are falling on blind eyes. Just show the content and I can use my brain and/or some native computer app to sort and filter whatnot if the need arises. Coolness, prettiness, featureitis are for ... umm ... I don't know who it is supposed to attract. Mersenne.org is nerdy to the extreme (right?), so do most of those nerds really care what colour something is, or how awesome a drop shadow looks in an accordion-animated-clock-tick-wasting submenu?

And since I am reminded about it now. I turned off all animations in my Windows box because I found that waiting the extra half-second for the content to animate itself into position extremely annoying.

[retina]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

Any particular reason you're still on FF 3.6.x? I'd imagine you could still upgrade to a newer version and still disable Javascript, but then boom you've got support for all the standard features introduced in the past 5-6 years. We're talking no more weird CSS extensions like -moz- or -webkit-

The reason is because I can no longer trust the FF folks not to screw it up. A previous upgrade turned my JS back on and removed the option in the dialogue box to control it, the bastards. That was the last straw for me and I upgraded back to 3.6.28 and turned off updates and now I get no more nasty surprises.

[Madpoo]

Originally Posted by retina

So a lot of comments about how a site looks bad, isn't cool or won't have feature X without JS. So my counter to that is I don't care. Your arguments are falling on blind eyes. Just show the content and I can use my brain and/or some native computer app to sort and filter whatnot if the need arises

Well, to each their own.

I'll try to make sure the site will at least be usable even if it looks horrible and let you make it beautiful in your mind.

For everyone else I'll try to make it easy to use and appealing to the eyes.

[blip]

... coming back to bootstrap, which is (mostly) a css framework and should releave from reinventing all those nifty effects. I fact, this is what it is all about... Of course you can use (lots of) fancy js and jquery, but you can also just stick to the defaults a given theme provides (and then concentrate on content)

Even for nerds: orderly and winsome presentation of stuff helps digesting it. I first learned about group theory as a kind of a moot glass bead game, and then someone enlightened me showing me all their geometric beauty.

[retina]

Originally Posted by Madpoo

I'll try to make sure the site will at least be usable even if it looks horrible and let you make it beautiful in your mind.

And I do realise and appreciate what you are doing. My little feature-poor old-school no-frills bare-bones no-nonsense memory-leak-free stable browser will thank you for it also.