DrDoc - 3:51 pm on Jul 24, 2007 (gmt 0)

Excellent post!

I am so glad that your post has taken the approach it has, and not what I was afraid of finding when I read the "featured thread" subtitle with regards to supporting old browsers.

What you have posted above is exactly the way of dealing with old or unknown useragents -- make sure things degrade well.

Way too often (especially in the JavaScript forum) I see people pull their hair out trying to get a particular script to work in an old browser. Hey, if the browser is really old, chances are that a very very limited number of your visitors will be using it. In these cases, making sure the fancy functionality works is really not worth it. Instead, provide an alternative way of accessing the information, or make sure that your fancy stuff degrades well and/or is usable without access to "fancy" stuff like JavaScript.

Now, if I may ... there is but one problem with one of the accessibility tricks -- combining display: none with <noscript> may very well result in a screen reader presenting both sets of content to its user! In cases where I have fancy functionality depending on JavaScript to work as intended (and where non-fancy stuff is included by means of <noscript>) I tend to not opt for hiding the contents using display: none. Instead, I write the fancy contents completely using JavaScript -- either by means of innerHTML or by modifying the DOM.

Just something to think about.