[whatwg] RE: Degrading of web applications

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 10 Sep 2004, Jim Ley wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Sep 2004 16:30:44 +0930, Chris Were <chris.were at gmail.com> wrote:
> > A particular web application that is designed entirely
> > around the functionality provided by XMLHR would have no requirement
> > to degrade nicely. Any degradation and it becomes useless as all its
> > functionality and content is provided through javascript.
> 
> That's just ridiculous, if any application has a requirement to
> degrade nicely, then just saying "this application uses javascript so
> doesn't have to" isn't something I can agree with I'm afraid.

It's worth noting that the person you are disagreeing with is representing 
the opinion of a Web application provider. If application providers 
consider that compatibility with non-JS browsers (and browsers with JS 
disabled) is not critical, then that is an important datapoint.


> I think this sort of attitude highlights why the WHAT-WG isn't 
> particularly correct when it says degradibility is an absolute 
> requirement, if people are happy to say "bog off browser not supported" 
> then we might aswell go straight to good solutions and not harp on 
> trying to tweak to text/html until it's even more of a mess.

I haven't yet seen anyone say that compatibility with IE6 isn't important, 
and that has always been the most important factor here. There's a huge 
leap of logic from "compatibility with the minority of browsers that don't 
support JS is not important" to "compatibility with the most deployed user 
agent is not importnat".

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'