How to handle web surfers, who disabled JavaScript
Article describes how to create a web page that can be viewed
by users, who disabled JavaScript support or whose web browser
does not support it.
There are hundreds of millions of Web surfers today. Each of
them uses one of multiple web browsers available now. You as a
Webmaster create cool web pages that are full of graphic and
JavaScript and look very impressive in modern web browsers like
Internet Explorer or FireFox. But ask yourself: "How my cool web
page will look like, if the web surfer use Linx browser (text
based) or just disabled JavaScript support?" You may think that
number of Linx browser users is quite small today and you can
ignore them, but search engines spiders does not support
JavaScript as well. You cannot ignore search engines in the
modern world.
There are some safe ways how to handle search engines spiders
and web surfers, who does not support JavaScript, at your web
page.
One of the approaches is provided by HTML. It is a NOSCRIPT tag.
You can enclose in NOSCRIPT tags HTML code that will be
displayed in browsers that do not support scripting. You can
place navigation hyperlinks here, if you use JavaScript menu for
this purpose. Instead of content, dynamically generated by
JavaScript, you can place some static text between NOSCRIPT
tags. NOSCRIPT content is invisible for web surfers, who use
modern web browsers, but it will be very useful for Linx users
and search engines spiders.
The second, more flexible approach, is using of JavaScript. Yes,
you can use JavaScript to handle visitors, who does not support
JavaScript. It is simple. You can place at the web page HTML
elements with the content that should be visible for these who
does not support scripting. Then place at the bottom of the page
simple script code that sets ".style.display" property to "none"
for such elements. Therefore, if your web page is viewed in the
browser, which supports scripting, script code will be executed
and all additional elements become invisible. If your web page
is viewed in the browser, which does not support scripting,
script code will be ignored.
So, using these simple approaches, you can handle all possible
web browsers and provide search engines spiders with additional
relevant content, which is very important as well.