Hi

My name is Phil and I live in Lincolnshire.UK. I've been designing websites mainly as a hobby for 2-3 years mainly using Frontpage 2003.

I'm very interested in getting to grips with Javascript and have just bought a few second hand books to study and put into practice.

The main point I need to clear up (in my head) is this: If a visitor to my site doesn't have Javacript - they can't see the effects that I've written but will see an invite to download it (?)

What if they don't want to download?- can they still see the rest of the page - or do I need to give them an alternative?

I'm sorry if this a really stupid question - but it's really bugging me and I need to know before I can progress.

Many thanks

Phil

No. They'll simply get errors. The overwhelming majority of users have JavaScript enabled. In over a decade of programming on the web, I can probably count on my fingers the number of problems I've had with my sites due to users not having JavaScript.

It's nice to be aware of the problem, but I wouldn't let it worry you.

According to the W3Schools, 90% of users have javascript enabled:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

I agree that it shouldn't be much of a problem as long as you don't rely on javascript for important stuff, such as input validation, that for security purposes should always be performed on the server (you can have something on the client to speed up the process, but the iron walls needs to be on the server).

It depends how you code. You can work into your code to detect JavaScript capability, and to downgrade nicely for those few who don't. Based on my server statistics on the billions of DaniWeb visitors, well over 99% have JavaScript enabled. The few who don't are mostly using WebTV or a PDA / Palm to surf the web.