Depending on your involvement with web development, you know of a thing called JavaScript. According to Wikipedia, “JavaScript is an
object-oriented scripting language used to enable programmatic access to objects within both the
client application and other
applications.” In other words, it’s a programming language that lets you do fancy things. It’s used on pretty much every web page on the Internet, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter. Back in the old days before JavaScript, most pages were static HTML, and looked their age (see Geocities). Since around 1996 or whenever JavaScript was implemented, sites have dealt with people who have JavaScript enabled as well as disabled.
Well, the day that JavaScript-lacking browsers must be dead is here! The new
http://tjhsst.edu website, the site of my high school, has apparently proclaimed that JavaScript is required to view the Internet correctly, and is the first one to remove support for non-JS’ed browsers. There is no notice saying that it needs to be enabled, just a nice, broken page. As shown in the images below, with the JavaScript-enabled browser on the left and the browser without JavaScript on the right, the appearance is pretty much horribly broken for the main website, and navigation to the secondary pages is completely broken, as those menus are done through JS. The secondary pages aren’t quite as bad, though. Just a bit of rendering difficulties, while the content (thankfully just text) displays fine.
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| http://tjhsst.edu with JavaScript enabled |
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http://tjhsst.edu with JavaScript disabled
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| http://tjhsst.edu/abouttj with JavaScript enabled |
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| http://tjhsst.edu/abouttj with JavaScript disabled |
Webmasters: please keep in mind that not everybody is the same as you. Not everyone wants to use JavaScript, and there are even some that don’t have access to it.
TJ webmasters: your site has a little work needed
