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• Tommy Olsson
  July 6th, 2005 at 7:20

  I don’t know if I’d agree with you categorically, but in essence you’re right. (Funny how this topic seems to POP up in several places right now.)

  If you find yourself using noscript, you should take a step back and consider if there really is no other way.

• Robert Nyman - author
  July 6th, 2005 at 9:18

  If you find yourself using noscript, you should take a step back and consider if there really is no other way.

  Then we agree on that at least!

• Tom Greuter
  July 6th, 2005 at 10:31

  I don’t see the difference between the second and third approach. Why should you use javascript to hide alternatives for javascript, when we have an excellent element that will in fact do the same: noscript?

  Of course, you won’t use the noscript-element to display just text alternatives, but instead to provide a serious non-javascript alternative.

  If javascript must be unobtrusive, then why use javascript at all? If your unobtrusive javascript nevertheless improves (progressive enhances) your site, then why not try to provide an (more or less) equal improvement with noscript?

  I know these discussions run elsewhere too, but I’m curious to your point of view.

• Robert Nyman - author
  July 6th, 2005 at 11:15

  Tom,

  Thanks for the questions!

  They’re valid and I guess I have to say that, to me, it comes down to development time and maintenance. Most web site visitors have a web browser that supports JavaScript and have it enabled.

  Hence, you want to use JavaScript to enhance their experience, but you still don’t want to loose any major functionality so you use unobtrusive JavaScript.

  What this means is that even if you do cater to the people where JavaScript isn’t an option, the fallback is normally not as advanced as the JavaScript alternative, usually just some text or so.

  Normally, the percentage of visitors without JavaScript are as small part of it, so it’s hard to justify the time and money needed to include an equally advanced improvement.

  I hope my answer was satisfactory!

• Tom Greuter
  July 6th, 2005 at 11:31

  Robert, I do agree with you on the small amount of people not using javascript, and I think it’s valid to ask yourself if you have to put much time in satifying this small group extensively (good can be good enough).

  However, I don’t see any argument in favour of not using the noscript tag.

• Robert Nyman - author
  July 6th, 2005 at 13:05

  Tom,

  You’re putting pressure on me here!
  Why not use the noscript tag?

  Basically, it’s a matter of approach. I personally think the best way is to handle it from an external script, as opposed to having an extra element in the source code.

  I guess it might also be a matter of changing it later on, if you have many different pages. Instead of removing noscript tags in several places, you just change the script.

• Tom Greuter
  July 6th, 2005 at 13:21

  If it’s a question of maintainability, in some cases you may be right, in others maybe not. Anyway, I will consider your approach when I’ll face this problem. Thank you for your quick response!

• Robert Nyman - author
  July 6th, 2005 at 13:28

  No problem!
  Thanks for making me explain my standpoint more thoroughly!

• CSS Greut » Webstandaarden verkeerd begrepen
  July 20th, 2006 at 22:19

  [...] dat ze regelmatig een zwart-wit stelling poneren en iedere nuance missen. Al eerder had ik ruzie met een Zweed die het geldige HTML-element noscript wilde afschaffen.Nu stuit op ee [...]

• Ray
  August 30th, 2006 at 19:46

  What about this scenario (very simple example):

  I manipulate the DOM to insert, say, a paragraph with some “help” text at a certain position. That is, the paragraph is not part of the original source, but is created and added when the user clicks on a certain link/button (”Click here for help blabla”).
  All this is done nicely without inline JavaScript. So far, so good.
  But if the user/client has no JS, I want that paragraph to be there. The only solution I see is: put it in noscript.

  Note: The link/button that triggers the creation of the element is itself also a creation of DOM scripting. That way, with JS on, this works as expected and with JS off the user still sees the paragraph (and doesn’t see the trigger link/button, which would obviously be useless).

  How could one pull something like this off without noscript? I totally agree with the basic statement in your post, but in a case like this example, it seems to make sense. Unless I’m doing something wrong :).

• Robert Nyman - author
  August 30th, 2006 at 20:20

  Ray,

  If I’m not totally missing something here, why don’t just have the paragraph that’s intended there for non-JavaScript users in the original source (without noscript tags), and then just replace that with JavaScript for those with the necessary support?

• Ray
  August 31st, 2006 at 11:54

  Duh.. OK, I’m convinced. That’s obviously the right way to solve this elegantly. Thanks for the hint!

• Robert Nyman - author
  August 31st, 2006 at 11:56

  Ray,

  No problem.

• Tom Taylor
  October 14th, 2006 at 0:19

  Bit tricky when you want top use noscript tags for an alternative image tracking how many hits your site receives.

  Easily overcome though by making the DOM attack it, remove it, and replace with javascript instead

• Robert Nyman - author
  October 14th, 2006 at 13:44

  Tom,

  Yes, just some DOM replacement will do the trick.

• Jonathan Prugh
  January 31st, 2007 at 23:16

  Another argument against using the tag is that some user agents may have partial support for JavaScript.

  So, these agents will not display the content, but may choke on more advanced DOM scripting techniques.

  Best to display the alternate content then hide it with javascript after testing for object compatiblity.

• Martin Jansson
  February 14th, 2007 at 15:33

  Yet another argument against using noscript is that if you have javascript turned on and for some reason don’t get the requested .js-file, you’ll end up with neither the noscript-content, nor the js-generated content. Reasons for this might be an error on the server preventing the js-file to be delivered, or if you’re located behind a firewall blocking certain files.

  So doing as Robert says, putting the content in regular P’s and DIV’s and hiding it with javascript will prevent this.

• Lorren Biffin
  September 11th, 2007 at 20:51

  These are all valid points. However, I’d like to throw in my two cents.

  Our jobs as web developers are made more difficult with every technology update that rolls around, which is quite often. I don’t see any reason we need to cater to every 0.02% of users that have some fluke of a scenario destroy out web pages. Sure, it’s a scary thought… but from a time/money/productivity standpoint, even us perfectionists have to let good be good enough.

  As far as the noscript tag, there’s one reason not to use it, and one reason when it’s very useful.

  The reason not to use the noscript tag would be when the JS dependent feature is part of the functionality of the page. In that case, simply displaying text is (in my opinion) a bad idea. When coding your pages initially, you should code for the lower percentage of non-js users. Although this percentage is low, it’s big enough to account for. Then, code your JS around the HTML/CSS as it is. JS is very good for this.

  The scenario the noscript tag works well with is when using JS for display/effects. If your user doesn’t have JS enabled, the effects wont show…hence, you could benefit from linking to a style sheet inside a noscript tag with styles comparable to the JS styles and effects.

  Well, I’m getting a bit busy now, but I’m glad I toss my opinion out there.

  -Lorren

• Loque
  July 30th, 2008 at 16:17

  I completely agree with this article although what happens when you want to animate items on and off the page *and* you dont want it to flicker on load (whilst JS waits for the DOM to be ready before then hiding your elements for use with JS)…

  One (bad) method would be to hide the elements using ‘display none’ in the CSS doc and then reveal the items when required but then this wouldnt work for non JS users, not atleast without a noscrpt tag to make sure these elements werent hidden with no JS.

  sooo….. :¬)

• Loque
  August 18th, 2008 at 22:20

  Just found a solution, thanks to

  http://www.nabble.com/jQuery-General-Discussion-f15494.html

  which linked me through to

  http://www.thunderguy.com/semicolon/2007/08/14/elementready-jquery-plugin/

  It also highlighted to me that you could fire off an event before the DOM is ready anyway… and that this is probably the safest method for doing this(?). I love jQuery :¬

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