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

Gregor Kofler wrote:
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


You have pointed out where javascript makes things worse. I don't disagree. I was just pointing out where it makes things better. To the point where some sites are not usable or designable without it.


The people who maintain otherwise, obvious;ly haven't ever encountered javascript used to its best. To make things happen that simply couldn't be done at the same speed another way.

.

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