[BillGoates]

Less than 1% has JavaScript turned off. The answer to your question is the same as to if a website should support Netscape 3.

I would say the answer depends on what the target audience is, what kind of site it is, and how much time it will save.

[kls]

Right, when I was with Marriott we did extensive research of the subject. The numbers just don't add up. Now that I am on my own, I recommend to my clients that they take full advantage of the tools at hand. Butchering the development model to support less that 1% (it was a little higher when I was there around 1.5%) just cannot be justified. Further it is cheaper to build a clean modern code base and then route the non-JS traffic to a site built independent of the modern code base that supports non-JS client. The reality was that the business case could not be made to even spend the development effort to build out a non-JS site. It would have literally been cheaper to send ever non-JS user a new computer with a modern browser, than it would have been to spend the development effort to build the site. Graceful degradation to non-JS creates more complexity and increases the overall effort, when quantified that money is almost always better spent on a better returning effort like an IOS app or further features on the JS enabled site. Now days it is hard to make the numbers work to support a non-JS site. Personally, even if I had no other features to implement, I would spend the money saved from removing the complexity of graceful degradation, on color blind testing, site reader software testing for the blind or internationalization. All of which have better business cases than non-JS support.

While I am on the subject my group (the web) made the business case that having JSP and Javascript was redundant and added to the complexity and therefore the cost of development and maintenance. We where able to successfully transition away from back-end web frameworks two a pure JS/HTML/CSS front end. In doing so we where able to simplify our development model, which increased our defect resolution time as well as our new feature development time.