Isn’t it sometimes normal to gracefully degrade?

Question

I am creating a video sharing CMS that uses a lot of jQuery and ajax for everything from rich user interface effects to sending and receiving data to and from the database. When JavaScript is disabled, everything falls apart and 90% of the functionality does not work.

I'm starting to think that it’s normal not to gracefully degrade for certain types of sites, such as this one, which uses a flash player to stream main content - video. So, what would be a great choice for providing dual support in everything else if the main content of the site cannot be viewed. Even YouTube does not work with JS disabled.

I plan to release CMS under an open source license, so the question is:

For mass distribution (and for this type of site) does a good idea gracefully not get worse?

Answer 1

As long as you make it clear to users that they need JS, it’s okay to “fall apart” without JS. However, if you do not indicate that it should not work without JS, then people will get angry. Most people now expect sites to require JS in some aspects of their functionality.

For something as complicated as CMS with video, this is a users error if they do not activate JS. They should not expect something like this without JS, and even if it is, it is probably not worth your time to maintain two versions of your site: JS and non-JS, especially for something open.

Answer 2

Seeing that your application relies on javascript for its entire purpose, you cannot competently degrade. As long as your site clearly tells the user to enable javascript in order to get all of your awesome functionality and maybe some links on how to do this in different browsers, you should be fine.: D

Answer 3

You essentially choose an audience. This is not like the decision to support IE6. This is not right, and not wrong, it's just a question of what percentage of your audience you are willing to lose, in exchange for the ease of development at your end.

Nevertheless, I find progressive improvement (elegant degradation is the result) in order to be an effective and safe way of development. Make HTML first, make it work, and then add JS as sugar on top.

It doesn't seem like one of your users is running Javascript. Most likely speaking of my humble self, it is that you will have some JS small bug that kills everything. (JS tends to just dwell on exceptions, you may have noticed.)

It's nice to know that in case of such an error, your users can still use the site. This, in my opinion, is graceful degradation.

Answer 4

Graceful degradation does not mean that "everything works completely in every browser," it means "if your browser cannot handle something, you see something reasonable, not broken garbage."

In your case, simply discovering that the site will not work, and displaying a good error page explaining what is required will be an acceptable form of elegant degradation.

Answer 5

If you're a perfectionist, there's nothing wrong with letting people without JS know what’s going on, and not just letting the website crash. Here is a quick way: How to determine if JavaScript is disabled? .