[thelist] Who really turns off JavaScript?

[Eike Pierstorff]

Hello Tom,

I know that some schools and other public organizations do not allow 
Javascript, but I do not think that's the real problem - the problem 
seems to be rather that a lot of public facilities around here run stone 
age browsers on antediluvian hardware with legacy operating systems, and 
while these machines technically support some sort Javascript they are 
unlikely to execute AJAX scripts and stuff like that properly (sometimes 
I think some of them might have met the original Ajax while they were 
computing the design for that trojan horse thing).

Not all scripts fail gracefully, so this is possibly more annoying than 
no Javascript at all. So if your target audience includes the poorer 
parts of the population who depend on some kind of public access to the 
internet you probably want to be careful with Javascript (or even 
advanced CSS). Of course the situation might be different and hopefully 
better in the US.

Other than that I can not think of anything that's wrong with Javascript 
these days - unless you abuse it to do things that should be done on the 
server (security), but that's rather a discussion about good vs bad 
script than yes vs no.


-- eike