How Important Is Designing Version W/o Java?

[mike60640]

I'm a beginner web designer, trying to get perspective on advice i hear... Design version of your site that does not include java in case viewer has java turned off.Sure it's a possibility, but really, how many people have it turned off? What if my audience is graphic arts professionals or tech professionals?Any thoughts?Thanks

[boen_robot]

First, let me clear something up - Java and JavaScript are two different things, as you can see in the W3Schools' JavaScript introduction. Java programs (known as "applets" when used on web pages) can also be embedded into pages (similarly to Flash content), but that's a whole other story.As for JavaScript... not all phones have JavaScript support, JavaScript is sometimes turned off by IT administrators at corporations for "security reasons", and in addition, users (some unfortunate home ones, as well as other corporations) may be behind a proxy server that strips out JavaScript before giving it to them, so that regardless of their settings, they don't get JavaScript. If there's any chance that your site will be visited by corporate users (they may find your site at home, and then try to open it at work...) or mobile users, you should try to make your site so that it works acceptably well (obviously not as well, but still...) without JavaScript.If you highly depend on JavaScript, and can't really do anything with it (see GMail for example), it's OK to demand JavaScript in case its not available and/or develop an alternative version for such users (again taking GMail as an example), but you should still inform the user that this is their problem. Having a half working (i.e. "broken") application is a much worse experience.

[justsomeguy]

The percentage of people with Javascript enabled has hung in the low 90s for a while, it's usually between 90% and 95%.