Re: newbie: what if JavaScript is switched off in a browser?

Am Sat, 07 Mar 2009 07:27:31 +0000 schrieb The Natural Philosopher:

Here is another slant.


Not necessarilly...

Consider a browser, a link and a server, as two CPUS, one of which is
very close and has pretty tight coupling as well as a very high
bandwidth to the user, the other of which is very powerful, has access
to lots of data but is the far end of a much much slower link. And which
has to send the code that the client end runs.

If you entirely disable the local fastish CPU by disabling javascript,
you have no option but to get the main CPU do everything. This is
possible, but with a rapidly changing context this means many many
WHOLE pages being transferred over slow expensive links.

Whereas javascript allows you to download more data, and use the users
context to display only those parts of it which are relevant, and reduce
WAN traffic substantially. This makes a real difference over slow links,
and for a rapid response to user input.


When using proper authoring, the transferred data of subsequent page
requests can be small. CSS, scripts and images get cached on the browser
and only the "raw" page markup needs to be transferred. In addition the
transferred data can be gzipped and will result in few kilobytes of data
that needs to be transferred.

OTOH, most nowadays JS applications, which use XHR for content update are
extremely inefficient, by creating (huge) chunks of markup (all the load
on the server side) and delivering those. The client only assigns those
chunks to innerHTML properties - which means no load on the client
processor.

With XHR the not needed generation of re-usable markup can save some
processing time on the server. Again often negligible, since most of the
server side time will be spend on validating data, accessing databases.
Caching "dynamic" content on the server is also an option.

JS enhanced pages have their benefits, but a statement like "I don't see
how any proper big portal can offer any good experience for people
without JS." sounds pretty ...er... naive. There are plenty of large web
applications out there with little JS support.

Gregor


--
http://www.gregorkofler.com
http://web.gregorkofler.com - vxJS, a JS lib in progress
.

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