[whatwg] no <noscript> proposal

[Mikko Rantalainen]

Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> Christian Biesinger wrote:
> 
>>>Since browsers support DHTML there is no need for specialized fallback
>>>element. Authors can use any element and hide/replace it using scripts.
>>
>>That does not work if the user disabled javascript, or if the user agent 
>>does not support javascript (lynx, for example).
> 
> He's correct for a bit though. If you have the following element:
> 
>   <div id="noscript">
>    <p>Foo bar, etc.</p>
>   </div>
> 
> You could easily remove that DIV from the flow using javascript. And 
> when javascript is disabled it would show up. Of course, compared to 
> NOSCRIPT this is suboptimal at best.

I disagree. The <noscript> element is seldom used for anything else 
but "this page requires javascript to work". The way I currently
create web applications is to first make it work without any
scripting and finally write scripts that tweak the final result.
Often this tweaking requires removing existing elements or adding a
few new ones but it's all doable in every browser I would script for
anyway. The rest will get the default noscript version of the page.

If the script is going to add or remove at least one element in any
case there's very little extra work to remove the fallback behavior.
If we remove the noscript element, the DOM tree will be simpler and
therefore a little easier to script for the more complex cases.

I'd prefer suggesting that the noscript version is the default case
(and because it's the default there's no need for an extra element)
and any features or behavior added with scripting is optional extra
that needs to take care of everything required to "make it work".

-- 
Mikko