Approach to using AJAX - HIJAX

I have noticed that AJAX has started to be implemented into YACS. I like AJAX, but my concerns with using AJAX are around accessibility and is the main reason I have only used it on one of my websites to date.

One suggestion is to look at HIJAX - which is a way of designing websites that degrade gracefully when featuers like Javascript are not enabled.

Wikipedia (en)- Hijax

The idea is that your site design should always degrade and still be full usable, so if you dont have javascript or images or css you can still 100% use the website.

Side effects are things like SEO is affected (googlebot works like a screen reader with no images, css or javascript), which considering the great effort that has gone into the SEO side of YACS would be a shame to ruin.

I am all for using AJAX, but think that we need to be careful about how we use it. The only thing that we can rely on being standard is HTML. Images, CSS and Javascript are all optional.

I know that prototype has been selected as the AJAX library and will do some research into how well it degrades without javascript.

Cheers Nick