That’s so 1999

Brian Dillard, Friday, August 3, 2007 @ 12:23 am

Lots of trees (and pixels) have given their lives over the past 10 or 12 years to fuel the endless debate about graceful degradation, progressive enhancement and the separation of style and behavior from content. The web standards movement has gained traction by boiling the argument down to one simple assertion that geeks can sell to suits:

If you're in the business of hawking something - vintage hockey memorabilia, advertising impressions, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" or even plain old editorial content - then you should probably build web sites that make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to give you their money...

... even people who can't or won't enable JavaScript in their browser/phone/whatever.

It astounds me that we still have to belabor this point in 2007. But a random sampling of large commercial websites reveals that even the big players haven't yet taken this lesson to heart. United Airlines, Sears, Expedia and Amtrak, for example, fail in various subtle or spectacular ways when you disable JavaScript or employ a user-agent without it.

(If you're using Firefox, just install the Web Developer Toolbar, use the Disable menu to turn off all JavaScript, and load one of these sites.)

When you load United's new(ish) multimillion-dollar booking engine sans JS, you get a search form with empty date dropdowns and a bunch of links and buttons that don't work. Sears.com is even more insidious. With a little bit of work, you can get some products into your cart. But when you click the checkout button, nothing happens.

Once upon a time, most commercial sites would at least use a <noscript> block or a server-side browser sniffer to warn you that their sites required JavaScript to function. That's how Amtrak does it today. So does Expedia:

"To enable great site features that are currently disabled, simply make a few adjustments to your browser settings ...." And what, pray tell, qualifies as a "great site feature"? Apparently, the ability to search for flights at all:

I can understand how a start-up like Kayak - with its innovative Ajax UI - can afford to demand a modern, scriptable browser. That will all change when they have a mature business model. But a travel behemoth like Expedia?

Look at the biggest successes of the eCommerce gold rush. Amazon, eBay, Yahoo and Google just plain work on all sorts of user-agents. Often, they offer separate interfaces optimized for mobile or assistive devices. Disable JavaScript on these sites and you can shop, search and browse to your heart's content. How can a site like Expedia not emulate them? Last time I looked, travel was a low-margin, high-volume business. Even if you're throwing away only 1 percent of your business, that's still a _lot_ of wasted revenue.

I'm also at a loss to explain how what's left of our pathetic national passenger-rail service can afford to squander potential customers by requiring them to use a technology that opens up untold security holes in the browser used by the majority of the planet.

Most places, I'm the biggest JavaScript dork in the room. I'm writing on a blog called Agile Ajax, for god's sake! But I still expect my favorite sites to work when I'm stuck on a Windows machine whose network admin has ratcheted up the security to absurd proportions. When I borrow a pal's iPhone, with its five-second script timeout, I expect to be able to do _something_ on the sites I visit. Ditto when I'm on a tediously slow connection on a laptop overseas.

I don't mean to pick on these sites. Heck, in a former life I worked for one of Expedia's competitors, and our site failures in non-JS environments were often of the silent but deadly variety. Even earlier, I was a contractor at United itself, and I'd sooner page through my junior-high yearbook than look at the still-live JavaScript code I wrote for them. Back when I was at Reflect.com, a now-defunct customized-cosmetics emporium in San Francisco, I used to generate the entire homepage with JavaScript, just because I could. I was having fun learning the language.

That was then, this is now. Jeffrey Zeldman's "Designing With Web Standards" is in its second edition. Any number of blogs, articles and books spell it out for even entry-level developers exactly how they can architect web applications that benefit from all that JavaScripty, Ajaxian goodness without turning away users who can't or won't partake.

We have the tools. We can do it. When we don't, it's a deliberate choice. The next time you're gathering requirements for a consumer eCommerce application, sit down with your client in front of a zippy new Vista PC running IE7 with JavaScript disabled via the security settings. Then try to buy some slippers from Sears, or a hotel room from Expedia, or a ticket from United. I don't think you'll have much trouble selling progressive enhancement as a fundamental part of the solution you're building.

agile ajax

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