During my presentation on Wednesday concerning Ajax and ColdFusion 8, someone asked about degradation when JavaScript was turned off. What I had said was that I had not tested it, but I assumed that while stuff would render, anything dynamic would not work, including remote content. So for a text I showed this:

I loaded it up in the browser and confirmed that test2.cfm loaded. I then disabled JavaScript and reloaded the page. The pod rendered just fine, but was now empty.

Now for the cool part. I changed my code to:

I reloaded the page and there was my warning. I re-enabled JavaScript, reran the page, and test2.cfm showed up! You could, in theory, use this for simple JavaScript detection. If test2.cfm had a cflocation in it, you could then use this code to warn the user that they must enable JavaScript to continue. Not sure if that is a great idea - but it seemed like a neat trick.