[pdkl95]

Progressive enhancement is easy. Your framework or development tools should do most of the work for you. Maybe try different tools?

> run on Gopher

Nonsense - CSS is very powerful, and all the functionality most websites need works fine with <form>s.

Part of the problem may be the difference between nice features with necessary features. Nobody would expect fancier features such as custom buttons/widgets or fancy client-side form verification to work without Javascript. You have to do all the checking on the server anyway.

> cognitive dissonance

Err, no - leaving out progressive enhancement is just lazy. Why would you prefer to shows people a broken website as a first impression? Do you even know how many people see a broken website? (i.e. do you check server logs?)

[random_rr]

Do you do web development professionally every day? If so, how long would you estimate you spend on making sure HTML-only pages render correctly?

Do you ever do advanced sites where multiple actions exist on one page that can't be easily encapsulated in HTML?

I ask because calling devs lazy for not backwards-checking their JS scripts is a bit much. So you want them to solve the problem they just solved, except this time, do it without some code assistance? That seems a bit unreasonable.

For many sites these days it is acceptable and justifiable to run Javascript. That was not true in the early 2000's, but we are a long way from there.

[jedrek]

Agreed. Neither Facebook nor YouTube run without JS enabled, which means that the vast majority of your users will never even consider turning it off.

[pdkl95]

Facebook and YouTube, as highly interactive applications, are not "most websites".

Practically ever single blog, news site, store, business page, and the like have zero need for Javascript, and requiring it only makes your site look broken. The maybe better with Javascript, of course.

While I haven't worked on websites in the last year or so, I have made websites professionally in the past for many years. Making a progressively enhanced store that works without Javascript in Rails 2/3 was really easy.

> vast majority of your users will never even consider turning it off.

How do you know this? Are you guessing? Are you relying on Javascript-based analytics and are therefore blind to people that disable Javascript? Do you have server logs that show how many people disable Javascript? Is you site broken without Javascript so this claim becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy?

I ask this every time someone makes that claim, and have never gotten a response.

[jand]

> How do you know this? Are you guessing?

> I ask this every time someone makes that claim, and have never gotten a response.

Well, i am glad to help out. Have a look at [1] which presents data of 509.314 visitors.

Isn't that great? Now you don't have to ask every time somebody makes that claim!

[1] https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missi...

[ssalazar]

This is honestly just out of touch with most modern Web development. Even if its "easy" to develop (which is debatable), if its not a priority with product managers it will simply not happen in today's "more with less" technology industry. Consider also that users who block JavaScript also block most analytics packages (by design)--from a data-driven product management standpoint, users who block JavaScript literally don't exist. Web QA is hard enough across multiple browsers and OSes; adding to that a second version of the site for users whose presence can't even be quantified is not going to be popular.

[brenschluss]

> Nonsense - CSS is very powerful, and all the functionality most websites need works fine with <form>s.

"You don't need a language other than __. __ is a Turing-complete language, thus is very powerful, so it should have all the functionality most developers need."

[pdkl95]

> a Turing-complete language

Most websites don't even need a Turing-complete language. Which is kind of the point - Javascript is a security risk and a privacy risk precisely because it is Turing-complete.

[kolinko]

Css is also turing complete. Seriously.