Rails - Jul 2006 - degrading gracefully - how to tell if JS is enabled?

Is there a RoR best practice wrt determing in a visitor''s browser has
JS disabled?  Is there even a way to find out?  I''ve got a couple of
pages in my app that are not going to degrade gracefully at all.  I really need
to point a visitor who has JS disabled down a seperate path.  Any ideas?

Thanks,
Bill
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On 7/5/06, Bill Walton <bill.walton@charter.net>
wrote:
> Is there a RoR best practice wrt determing in a visitor''s browser
has JS
> disabled?  Is there even a way to find out?  I''ve got a couple of
pages in
> my app that are not going to degrade gracefully at all.  I really need to
> point a visitor who has JS disabled down a seperate path.  Any ideas?
This works with Firefox.  No idea how IE handles it.

Put this somewhere inside your HEAD element.  Change the URL to
something meaningful.

<noscript>
    <META http-equiv="refresh"
content="1;URL=http://localhost:80/">
</noscript>

-- James

On 7/5/06, Bill Walton <bill.walton@charter.net>
wrote:
>
>
> Is there a RoR best practice wrt determing in a visitor''s browser
has JS
> disabled?  Is there even a way to find out?  I''ve got a couple of
pages in
> my app that are not going to degrade gracefully at all.  I really need to
> point a visitor who has JS disabled down a seperate path.  Any ideas?
It depends what you want to do.

You could have a split at the very beginning of your site. I haven''t
tested this

<a href="http://domain.com/site_without_javascript"
onclick="window.location.href=''http://domain.com/site_with_javascript;
return false;">enter site</a>

You could use this at any particular link within your site as well.
Maintaining two sets of views wouldn''t be DRY.

Or for just a few places that need special attention you can use the
<noscript> tags. For a simple drop-down box form you can have a button
appear for people without Javascript.

<form>
  <select onchange="this.form.submit();">options in
here</select>
  <noscript>
    <input type=''submit'' value=''send this
thing''/>
 </noscript>
</form>

- Peter

On Wed Jul 05, 2006 at 01:54:32PM -0500, James Ludlow
wrote:
> On 7/5/06, Bill Walton <bill.walton@charter.net> wrote:
> >Is there a RoR best practice wrt determing in a visitor''s
browser has JS
> >disabled?  Is there even a way to find out?  I''ve got a couple
of pages in
> >my app that are not going to degrade gracefully at all.  I really need
to
> >point a visitor who has JS disabled down a seperate path.  Any ideas?
> 
> This works with Firefox.  No idea how IE handles it.
> 
> Put this somewhere inside your HEAD element.  Change the URL to
> something meaningful.
> 
> <noscript>
>    <META http-equiv="refresh"
content="1;URL=http://localhost:80/">
> </noscript>
the raelian way to gracefully degrade is something like

respond.to do |type|
 type.js {render rjs}
 type.html {redict to blahblah, where rhtml is rendered}
end

not the xact syntax..

> 
> -- James
> _______________________________________________
> Rails mailing list
> Rails@lists.rubyonrails.org
> http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
>

On 7/5/06, Bill Walton <bill.walton@charter.net>
wrote:
>
>
> Is there a RoR best practice wrt determing in a visitor''s browser
has JS
> disabled?  Is there even a way to find out?  I''ve got a couple of
pages in
> my app that are not going to degrade gracefully at all.  I really need to
> point a visitor who has JS disabled down a seperate path.  Any ideas?
Hi Bill,

I just made a controller that degrades gracefully using respond_to
with html and rjs templates. I''m not sure who really has JavaScript
disabled in their browser but I was very pleased with how little extra
work it took to accommodate both. Maybe an extra 20 lines of code. For
something like a store front, where every sale is critical, this might
be a good approach.

Peter