Using JavaScript for Core Navigation or Function is Dangerous

I know the iPad is new and Web developers have not had a chance to update their site to be compatible with it but… When you are designing a site it should fail gracefully and fall back on more compatible controls. There’s nothing I cannot stand more than to get to a web site to find that the entire site is nothing but a big Flash or ASP.NET application pretending to be a web site. If you are going to have your site function like that, then please have a plain text version of your site linked somewhere on the page. This is also a good solution for ADA compliance.

JavaScript has become the new Flash in some cases. Web developers are using it in places where a standard HTML control would do the job just as well. Recently while trying to search this vendor’s training site I was stopped when I could not select my training location. I did not want to have to scroll through every training location in the results and TX was off the bottom of the popup window. A select control would have worked in this situation just as well but understand that people usually have trouble with multiple selections. That was probably the reason for the change of design. It’s still frustrating.