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Here’s a question for all web developers to answer. If you are a standards-based web designer/developer you try to do everything inside the bounds of these standards. We have been doing standards based web design for awhile but this is one of the first times I have come upon this issue. And my guess is it comes up for anyone doing any data intensive web applications.

While working on an application we stumbled on to a problem. For usability purposes we wanted to implement a javascript method for the handling of a specific amount of data. Doing this adds a very large file size into the project which may more may not cause speed issues. If we do not use javascript to solve the problem we are forced to post the page back every single time the user attempts to use a specific function. But, we are guaranteed that it is optimized.

We are also running into the same issue here with our blog. Since we use blogger as a platform we are stuck with their horrible commenting process. If you want to comment here you have to leave the site, post your comment, and come back. As a user I would simply choose not to leave a comment. We also had a problem where visitors would have to leave our site to even see comments. We fixed that with some conditional tags and javascript but it didn’t hurt the performance much. So we have a new dilemma of implementing a giant javascript application to handle all commenting or we can just screw it and let you guys go back and forth between websites just so we can keep the web appliation thin, clean, and neat.

I think usability outweighs accessibility in these circumstances. Even if you will lose face to the upper echelons of standards based developers you will know that the user is getting the better experience even if you had to cut corners.

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