Shadenfreude? or just great to be vindicated? (Show or prove to be right, reasonable, or justified)
It was gratifying to have my development approach so well demonstrated recently.
Lifehacker (from Gawker ) without javascript enabled
Gawker and Lifehacker had some major problems due to their over reliance on javascript, or rather in particular an aspect of js. See the wall street journal article. With what Gawker and Lifehacker had done, any bad piece of js would break their webs – what a risk to take.
The situation and reasons are documented quite nicely by
- Mike Davies: isolani – describes the dangers of hashbang urls and the reliance then on perfect js
- adactio – describes the robustness principle and why this is important
- Kyle Neath – on why url design is important. See the section on querystrings – this is how the wordpress event management plugin can be very powerful through the use of parameters passed to the query string.
Good plugin development
I have always developed starting with basic validated html that is not reliant on css, let alone javascript. Css and if absolutely necessary javascript are added only after the whole thing works with the just the html. Go ahead – try to create a event using my events plugin with javascript disabled … yes you will see a whole host of recurring event options that you did not even know were there, most importantly, it will still work!
Remember to switch the js back on again before you start wondering why all sorts of functionality is not working!
I have been increasingly concerned about the over reliance on javascript, in particular how easy it is for a plugin with poor js scripts to break bits of your website.
