[kalid]

Tell that to facebook (http://i.imgur.com/9FdJa.png) :-).

The problem with bending over backwards for non-js is that you double your dev cycles (no AJAX, need regular forms for everything), lose dynamic menus (want to duplicate those?), lose a ton of instrumentation you may be doing, etc.

I think it's perfectly fine to say "non-js means you have a read-only experience". Even facebook doesn't go that far -- you can't even log in without js enabled! (And they're definitely in the camp of 2% * 500M).

What will people do who have js disabled? They'll get a tech friend to help, because that disabling was probably a misconfiguration :).

At some point you have to prioritize your time to work on the features that help 95% of your users.

[mike-cardwell]

Facebook caters for non js people by directing them to the cut down mobile version of the site. Which is not a perfect solution, but it is much much better than simply telling them to go away.

[kls]

The problem with bending over backwards for non-js is that you double your dev cycles

I would think you are being generous. A marked advantage of JS based RIA is rapid time to market, it is a simpler development model that provides superior usability when done correctly. The old page post model is a considerably slower development model. Hence all the server side frameworks, people have been trying to crack that nut, in the page post model, since someone bolted up CGI POST to a script and spit out some dynamic HTML.