[norenh]

I am one of those dinosaurs that still surf with javascript (mostly) disabled. I use uMatrix to control where I accept it from and my default is to allow none to load. A remarkable amount of sites still work and you will always need to load some to get certain functions to work.

However, I am always amazed how lazy devs are when it comes to purely informational sites as there should be no need to require javascript. Sure, it might help with certain cosmetics but the people who disable javascript rarely care about cosmetics (it is nice, sure, but if you cannot view the site without enabling a bunch of untrusted code to run on you computer then I really must want to visit it to enable it and reload the page).

Hackernews, LWN, arstechnica are all sites that works really well without javascript enabled (ars needs it for comments, but I rarely comment so if I want to I can enable then). Reddit and many more sites somewhat needs to it but you can usually see the interesting bits without it, so if you are invested or a common visitor it is easy to enable the few needed.

If you are directing your content towards the technical community, my advise would be to definitely test it without Javascript, preferably in a text only browser also. It does not need to look super pretty in these modes, but it should work. This is probably also a good foundation to provide the content to groups that uses accessibility software (think blind), but I do not know how well those tools handle JavaScript-dependant content.

[hundchenkatze]

You can access Ars' comments without JS by using the forum.

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewforum.php?f=2

[norenh]

Thanks! That is really helpful!