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 :¬

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….. :¬)

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

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

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.

Yes, just some DOM replacement will do the trick.

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

No problem.

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?

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 :).

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.

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

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!

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.

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!