Reply to Re: AJAX Websites
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JavaScript is an enhancement language at best. A proper browser has no other requirement than to support HTML. None other.
CSS is a secondary layer, which is optional, and any scripting language is tertiary. Scripting should only be used to do stuff that would also work when scripting is disabled, such as validating a form before it's submitted, and so on.
I'm not saying you cannot use AJAX, by the way, but if you do, you must also do as Google has done, and make a version that does not use it as well. (Their "plain HTML" version) The problem is, just like with sites driven by Flash, is that people just don't do this.
And with search engines, you have totally missed the point. It's rarely a site's home page that is of interest when you are looking for something. Let's say I'm, e.g., looking for information about "catnip". That would likely be on a site about cats. Would that be on the front page, you think? No. It would probably be somewhere deeper in the site's hierarchy. Thus, a decent search engine would need to go deeper than the home page of a site.
As for search engines adapting to things like AJAX: I don't think so. It would require so much more processing power if a search engine were to learn to parse javascript. It would take immense more computing power with Google (or other search engines) to get that working properly, not to mention that such things usually require user intervention to work, which a computer could never simulate correctly anyway.
Yes, the web should and was intended to cater to everybody, and it does so when you make your pages using HTML with CSS and Javascript as an enhancer only. What happens server-side (e.g. with PHP) does not harm accessibility at all. That's why they were invented.
CSS is a secondary layer, which is optional, and any scripting language is tertiary. Scripting should only be used to do stuff that would also work when scripting is disabled, such as validating a form before it's submitted, and so on.
I'm not saying you cannot use AJAX, by the way, but if you do, you must also do as Google has done, and make a version that does not use it as well. (Their "plain HTML" version) The problem is, just like with sites driven by Flash, is that people just don't do this.
And with search engines, you have totally missed the point. It's rarely a site's home page that is of interest when you are looking for something. Let's say I'm, e.g., looking for information about "catnip". That would likely be on a site about cats. Would that be on the front page, you think? No. It would probably be somewhere deeper in the site's hierarchy. Thus, a decent search engine would need to go deeper than the home page of a site.
As for search engines adapting to things like AJAX: I don't think so. It would require so much more processing power if a search engine were to learn to parse javascript. It would take immense more computing power with Google (or other search engines) to get that working properly, not to mention that such things usually require user intervention to work, which a computer could never simulate correctly anyway.
Yes, the web should and was intended to cater to everybody, and it does so when you make your pages using HTML with CSS and Javascript as an enhancer only. What happens server-side (e.g. with PHP) does not harm accessibility at all. That's why they were invented.
