Ditch Some of the JavaScript for Markup Elements

Most people have Javascript automaticly enabled. Though I am saying that it is not Good web design to rely so heavly on javascript.

Also, Dan Brown and the admins are not the people who created the board, It is the people at proboards.

I did mean it is not good web design to use javascript to design. But there is not a huge amount of people with javascript disabled.

A study released by W3 web standards


source: www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

But I agree that it should be fixed, because we want everybody to be able to use the site.

I do think there is a small small hope, as from what I recollect form POGOTOK #4, Dan Brown and the admins are all in contact with the proboards staff. If the proboards staff is willing to help, maybe they can change the system so as to improve the design and change the markup for a JavaScript-less alternative.

About real forum packages, I think they need to be very carefully chosen. phpBB is a good option because of its high use and support, but maybe it has too much stuff, or it may be too resource intensive (due to the amount of features it has to support), or it may be harder to work with because of how generic it needs to be. A lighter alternative maybe wouldn't be bad, but then some important features might be missing, and we would have less support with less known alternatives.

And although people might disagree with me, and my next opinion is subjective, the option should definitively be Open Source, just for more of a ethical reason. We seek to know more and to share our awesome with others, I think the only way to start doing that (not actually doing it, but start doing it) is trough transparency in the acts, openness in the standards and allowing the basic freedoms in our works.

Also have in mind that even tough more and more people have JavaScript enabled by default, not everybody has it enabled (one person had that problem and didn't even knew on the banner thread). Also, even when it is enabled by default, more and more people are disabling it after installing the browser which comes with it enabled.

Placing a warning might be a great or terrible idea according on how it is made, so I go against it. Although JavaScript is necessary for the full experience, this site is somewhat usable when JavaScript is disabled.

Disabling JavaScript might lead to one of several things, being the most likely:

You place a small warning, you remove it with JavaScript, and you never more maintain the non-JavaScript version, until sometime in the future a person complains, you go check the back-end, and the content is so dependent on JavaScript a major redesign is necessary to make it somewhat usable again for non-JavaScript users.

Or... you simply block the page to people without JavaScript, which is even worse.



And this is why we don't need so much things to depend on JavaScript. Our forum has so much customizable things , and having in mind it was written specifically for us, we can change all things to make most of the JavaScript unnecessary.

Have in mind that I still agree with the use of JavaScript for other things, for example, the tags toolbar, as it is impossible to do it without it. This should not end in an 8 or 88. We can have a middle ground in which the site is perfectly usable when JavaScript is disabled, in which people have all styles made, all content properly arranged and the banner in place; and have an even better experience for people with JavaScript, handling everything fluidly, enabling the tags toolbar... real time updates... the whole things everybody wants.

My question is then: why maintain 2 themes when we can make a single theme that works as good or even better than the current theme for both JavaScript and non-JavaScript users? It requires less maintenance, would be lighter on the bandwidth, would be easier to modify in the future and would be usable by everybody.

And the advantages of only maintaining one theme are very strong. It requires a little more work now, but in the future, updating the look of the site would only require to change one file (the CSS file), for example. Or to add some fancy effect, it would only be necessary to mess with one other file (the JavaScript file). And no matter which fancy things we did with the JavaScript, the site would never have problems with navigation when JavaScript is disabled.

What I am trying to say is that we don't need to remove features to make the theme work for everybody. We only need to change the technologies used in it (more POSH, more CSS, and less JavaScript, although still existent).

So, my final opinion is: a second theme would be a good solution, but having only one theme, made so as it works for everybody would be more beneficial both for JavaScript and non-JavaScript users, as well as the admins and proboards staff managing the boards.