AudlemOnline and Javascript

This article follows a comment received about the use of javascript on the new website.

In point of fact, the new mark IV version of AudlemOnline uses less javascript in general terms than the previous version – this is mainly through better use of CSS controls for the various menus and other displays.

However, those parts of AudlemOnline which deal with the puzzles and the interactive map still rely heavily on javascript. The display of directory entries uses javascript for the "concertina" displays which allow users to select which bits of information they wish to see – without it there would be a mass of detail, most of it irrelevent for a particular enquiry.

In the early days of website development, javascript was regarded as a potential security risk, and indeed some viruses (viri??) made use of holes in the javascript protective envelope – nowadays, however, it is not regarded as a major security problem and most modern websites (including for example the BBC News site) use javascript. All the standard browsers (including IE, Chrome, Safari, Mozilla etc) support javascript, although there are some minor and extremely irritating differences between the implementations.

If you do disable javascript in your browser and then access AudlemOnline, you should find that you can still read the news stories and quite a lot of other parts of the site, but the games, map, and directories will not work properly.

In light of the general industry acceptance of javascript on websites, we have not thought it necessary to display any kind of home-page "warning".

This article is from our news archive. As a result pictures or videos originally associated with it may have been removed and some of the content may no longer be accurate or relevant.