[thelist] navigation through form posting

[aardvark]

> From: "David Kutcher" <david_kutcher at hotmail.com>
[...]
> >  - link destinations are obscured in a manner even
> >    worse than obscuring it with descriptive text
> Not necessarily true, but a good point.  You can put alt text on a
> form submit button.

NN4.x has a bug in displaying alt text on image submits... it shows the name
instead of the alt in the tooltip...

of course, it sounds like you don't care about NN4.x...

but that doesn't change the fact that in order to replicate some built-in
features of web sites (opening links in new windows, seeing the destination of
the link in the status bar), you have to add a crapload more JS to the page,
which will undoubtedly require version and function checking if you care to
make it work well enough and not break browsers with differing JS support...

code bloat means more than just bad HTML, it also means hundreds of lines
of JS just to replicate features that have existed since the dawn of the web...

> >  - non-js browsers and browsers with js disabled
> A non-js browser?  sigh.  I really wish we could get past browsers
> that don't support commonly used (98%+ of the market) technologies
> that have been around since 1996 (6 years+)

technologies that have been around for longer include opening links in new
windows and seeing the URL in the status bar, but somehow *removing* that
capability doesn't make anyone blink...

as for JS support, i surf with it off... my browsers support it, but i don't often
find sites i can't use without it... when i do, i just go to their competitors... i've
done that while shopping for cars, buying christmas gifts online, and other
online shopping...

i can say for a fact that it has cost sales for many sites i've visited, simply
because they require JS when it's never necessary or someone won't take the
time to make it work correctly on the server-side (it's amazing how many e-
comm sites you can hose if you turn off JS -- people seem to forget to do
server-side validation)...