(replying to foundation-l post on wikitech-l)
On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Brion Vibber <brion(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
So far this is the best way to provide a dynamic
notice to the majority
of our visitors without causing problems for others. If you have
technical suggestions for alternate implementations, they're welcome in
a more relevant channel such as wikitech-l.
The only non-script solution that seems like it would work well is
<iframe seamless> from HTML5:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/embedded-content-0.html#attr-iframe-seamless
This solves the current problem that <iframe>s must have a
prespecified height, which is why we can't use them now. Of course,
<iframe> isn't necessarily terribly well supported in weird browsers,
but it would be better than JavaScript.
One possible way we might have more graceful fallback now is to have
some <noscript> content. One possibility would be an <iframe>
containing the content (which might be the wrong height, but oh well);
another would be to have a message pointing to the announcements. Of
course, it would be non-dismissible without JavaScript, so it would be
best to keep it less obtrusive if possible. So the message seems like
a better idea.