[thezilch]

Not impossible as much as not worth the effort on the dollar. Reddit is fairly simple -- just a threaded-comment engine, if you will. You want the up/down rave to be progressive? So now every up/down is a form; already, drastically increasing the page's weight but I digress. You hook the body for form submits and reduce out your up/down forms; we are done, despite having a bunch of forms marking up the page.

Don't forget your form needs to be comprised of up and down submit-buttons; wouldn't want the progressive-CSS lords coming down on us.

Those fearful of JS come along... Collapse comments? Refresh the page, but don't forget to pass previous state of comments previously collapsed! Submit an up arrow? Don't forget that blob of state! Loaded deep-nested replies? Push it into state! Careful; none of this matters to 99.9% of your users, because they are understanding they'll lose the statefulness on refresh, while everything stateful happens inline and without refreshing the page and bringing in sections of the page as dictated by our stateful blob.

[romaniv]

What you're describing is not progressive enhancement. It's a mental exercise in re-implementing a website with workflows designed for heavy JavaScript usage without using JavaScripts. Which is silly.

For example, if you ever tried PE for real you would know that there is no point in implementing collapsible comments in pure HTML. That's exactly the kind of functionality you "enhance" via JavaScript. Of course, like most modern developers you've never really tried the practice, so you don't have any experience with such things.