[tomdelonge]

My target audience is females ages 20 to 65. What can I expect their browsers to be able to handle? Should I use ajax? What about download speeds? Should I be sending jquery and such? I'd like to be able to incorporate some of these features, but I'm not sure who will be able to handle them.

I haven't done a lot with ajax and jquery, so answer me this too:
Say I want to submit a comment without a page refresh. Can I test if they're browser will do it and if it won't then just do the page refresh?

Thanks.

[Synook]

AJAX is supported in every major browser since IE 5. jQuery supports "IE 6.0+, FF 2+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.0+, [and] Chrome".

As aforementioned AJAX is very well-supported, but if for some reason their browser doesn't want to run the scripts (e.g. JS is off) then you can just provide a href for the anchor as well and make the onclick event return the result of the JS - if it doesn't work the browser will just load the alternate location as specified in the href.

[solarisedesign]

Simple answer: Expect absolutely nothing about a user's browser. For all you know, they're using Lynx on a handheld or some such nonsense.

Basically, make sure you have fallbacks in place for all your AJAX effects. So that, for example, a user will be able to submit a comment using the normal HTML <form> tags, but if they have javascript, then the javascript will automatically AJAXify the form tag.

Basically, something like...

<form id="theform" method="POST">
<input type=text>
<input type=submit>
</form>

<script>
$("#theform").ajax({.. .. ..})
</script>

Or something along those lines.

p.s. - that code won't actually do anything. It's just a very rough example

[Shiro]

I agree. Program your site to work without javascript at all. Then overlay ajax on top to make it pretty.