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I'm looking for a decent Javascript widget toolkit, preferably with modern UI design (such as Dojo), AJAX for navigation and effects. However it must be flexible and fallback to HTML-only version nicely (for console users). Which one would you recommend ? What techniques should I generally follow ?

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I'd say that you shouldn't think too much about the javascript library right now. If your plan is to have a site that can work entirely without javascript, then build that site now without any javascript.

If you start out by building the site with javascript, you'll still have to add a bunch of HTML later, to make it work without javascript. So build the HTML-only version first because either way you'll need it. Then you can use whichever library you want to do progressive enhancement and make everything more dynamic/interactive/spiffier for when there is javascript available.

In other words: If there's no javascript, a library can't do anything about it, since it won't run at all. So a library can't "fall back" to something that isn't already in the HTML; you'll have to build that.

Not much of an answer to the actual question about libraries, but I hope its useful anyway.

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Thanks for insightful suggestions. I think a library choice would certainly matter here as implementation of widgets and APIs are different. I'd say I'm looking for some toolkit that would help to build another (yet optional) layer on top of my HTML-only front-end enriching default widgets and providing additional features such as AJAX navigation, dynamic pop-ups, graphs that'd appear instead of certain tables for stats etc.. Previously I've used jQuery UI where de-coupling is generally straight-forward from the start but I need more features and maturity than it currently offers.
@patrikas: I see what you mean. But it might be a tough challenge. You want the library you choose to be as decoupled as possible of course, but when you get into more advanced UI, it becomes harder to find a library that enhances existing markup; the more advanced ones tend to just build everything in javascript and ignore the markup. And then you're suddenly building 2 sites with little in common: A js-only version and a html-only version... But, I don't know every library out there, so I'm curious if anyone else has a good idea.

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