You probably know that it’s my hobby and as of now my only income source to make websites. While doing so, i often meet problems that are complicated to solve, not because of their complexity, but because i have to optimise for all the browsers i can: FireFox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, Netscape, just to name those i can test with. Having a couple of versions for each (especially IE is problematic), that’s at least four browsers to optimise to, and that already makes the creation of a relatively simple floated layout a nightmare.
But what was even more troubling for me is the usage of JavaScript. I know there are loads of possibilities in it (think of the dynamically created websites, the reload-less page loads and such), but i also know there are people, even if just a few, who browse without JS—not to mention that search engine crawlers don’t have JS either (nor do spam bots), which is useful to know when you’re protecting your forms from spam, but troublesome when you need to develop a website for the top of the search engine result list and for the everyday “lame” users.
When is it okay, and when is it an advantage to use a JS-based website? Obviously, it’s no way supposed to be used extensively on a website that must attract many visitors via search engines, websites where content is the primary value and it should be widely available. Thus JS is all right for community websites or for commenting on blogs, in case you’re brave enough to risk that the visitors’ browser may not be able to handle what you coded. Still, it’s so trendy, and so hyped that everyone wants to use Ajax and the other Ria techniques, even if they don’t need it at all… On the other hand, if you can secure the connection, why not use JS for authentication (commonly known as logging in) or admin area interfaces? You can see that once again these are fields where search engine optimising is not important at all–it’d be quite problematic at all, if search engine bots made their way inside the admin area…
I simply don’t know why or where should i be using these modern methods, if i should be. What’s the point in it? Say when i’ll need them i’ll know… That’s right, seeing i already have this instant search field on the sidebar, but doing a whole site based on that is totally pointless if it’s not something like plurk. Am i wrong?
