With all of the talk these days of Web 2.0 and the fancy, shiny, draggable, refreshable, blinking, glowing components in web applications, I wonder how many of the will still work when JavaScript is turn off or not even present (yes, it still happens). And how is the usability and accessibility of the application affected when so much of the interaction happens through JavaScript that doesn’t degrade?

I have been taking a look at creating a fully functional application, without any fancy Javascipt or AJAX, and then adding the extra functionality unobtrusively. To force myself to learn how to do this, I stopped using Prototype, script.aculo.us, and the Ruby on Rails helpers with RJS, and I started using JQuery. Two things happened: 1. I started to better understand how AJAX works and can enhance my application. 2. I found out I really like JQuery.

More on my JQuery experiences later. Now back to adding cool features, unobtrusively.