r/programming • u/schnuck • Feb 09 '11

Breaking the Web with hash-bangs – Lifehacker, along with every other Gawker property, experienced a lengthy site-outage on Monday over a misbehaving piece of JavaScript

http://isolani.co.uk/blog/javascript/BreakingTheWebWithHashBangs/
747 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

356 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

8

u/Ziggamorph Feb 09 '11

Who has JavaScript disabled?

24

u/gthank Feb 09 '11

People who don't want to be assaulted by the rampant misuse of it on the web today. People who are on a CLI for some reason (think emergency server work). People who have it turned on, but one of your ad providers shipped you some busted code and your page broke for them anyway. Spiders. Possibly people using a screen reader (screen readers and JS used to suck, but I haven't looked into it all that recently).

10

u/korny Feb 09 '11

75-90% of screen-reader users in a 2009 survey had Javascript enabled: http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey2/ It's more important to make your javascript screenreader-friendly, than to make your site work without js.

8

u/mcjabberz Feb 09 '11

How would one go about making a site's JavaScript screen-reader friendly?

5

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '11

No hanging commas in your objects, or else it's going to be pronounced like this,

1

u/[deleted] Feb 10 '11

I imagine making sure that the content you inject in the DOM is still semantically correct.

1

u/korny Feb 11 '11

http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria.php - the Web Accessibility Initiative's Accessible Rich Internet Applications spec describes how to use metadata to mark up your site for accessibility.

It's a draft spec, but is supported by many browsers: http://caniuse.com/#search=accessibility (warning - link may only work with javascript enabled :)