Add a 'safe mode' to the site. #579
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| function featureDetect() { | ||
| var safeMode = /[?&]safemode=on/i.test(window.location.search); | ||
| var cors = 'XMLHttpRequest' in window && | ||
| 'withCredentials' in new XMLHttpRequest(); |
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Note that it's fine if this code throws an exception--that essentially means that we definitely want to disable JS, and because ENABLE_JS won't be set to true at the end of the function, we'll be in safe mode.
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R+ Something I noticed, the list of clubs doesn't show with js disabled. A bug? |
Add a 'safe mode' to the site.
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Thanks!
Yeah, I've documented this in #573 (see the third bullet point). Because that content is dynamic and changes w/ user content submissions, it's very hard to make it part of a static site that doesn't use JS; we could for instance trigger a regular cron job that regenerates the static site based on the latest clubs data, which might be a feasible solution if the clubs were the only user-generated content on the site planned in the near future. However, we're going to be adding lots more UGC in the future, e.g. mentor profiles, so I think it's a better solution to just implement a lightweight dynamic server for v2 that renders views on-demand and aggressively caches them. Another benefit of this is that it will also make it easier for us to support standard, non-ajaxy form submission if we want, which would be a nice accessible solution for no-js folks too. (In other words, I think we should evolve this site so it "gracefully degrades" into a standard web-1.0 style website, but transforms into a badass hovercapable 1962 Chevrolet Corvette if the user's browser is cool enough.) |
This fixes #572 by simply disabling JS if the browser doesn't support a minimal feature set of supported JS APIs (at present, this means CORS). It also allows developers to force-enable this "safe mode" by adding
safemode=onto the querystring of any page.Note that I did look into Modernizr for this but because our detection is so simplistic, I found it easier to just borrow a snippet of code from them rather than create a custom build of Modernizr outright. That said, as I mention in the code comments, if our feature detection becomes more complex, we should probably consider migrating to Modernizr.