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Comment by Dr_tldr | Hacker News Reader

Most of enterprise development is on rich web apps that couldn't work at all with javascript. Saying that people who write javascript and don't use semantic html need to "learn the basics" is like complaining about people typing emails instead of hand-writing letters in cursive.

People like yourself who want HTML fallbacks for everything have a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of technology. At some point, it doesn't make sense for the biggest roads to have support for both cars and horse-drawn wagons.

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Any road will support a horse-drawn carriage. Unless you take extraordinary measures and start building vehicles using wheels with special profiles for which custom-designed roads will be necessary where those wheels will be held on track like with trains.

Naturally horses will stumble on those, and people like you will say the others don't understand the nature of transportation and should get rid of their old horses and conventional cars.

But perhaps the problem is just with you and you newly designed fancy wheels.

Except you're a a tiny and economically irrelevant minority who own cars but are intentionally disabling them due to some sort of mental block about it not being the year 1994 anymore.

If you want to be Cyber-Amish, that's absolutely your right, but much like the actual Amish, you will need to create your own society that serves your needs instead of trying to drag us back into the past with you.The Amish are not demanding that the International Space Station build a wooden module to accommodate them, nor do they buy plane tickets with the expectation that the pilot will still get them there but won't turn on the engine due to the religious beliefs of a tiny minority. Everyone has the right to unreasonable beliefs, but when they try to be smug and condescending about their own backwardness... yeah. You are the human equivalent of IE6.

> Most of enterprise development is on rich web apps that couldn't work at all with javascript.

Doesn't enterprise development stay within enterprises? As for the public facing web, even if the functionality requires Javascript, having it look like crap without Javascript does seem kind of lazy. I'm even for being lazy, I don't test everything and on every device, but when something is pointed out to me, at least I realize it's suboptimal, and don't rationalize regression into progress.

https://www.w3.org/wiki/Graceful_degradation_versus_progress...

Nothing really changed to make these best practices moot.

Most of the enterprise internet ends up becoming the public facing internet. Enterprise isn't a moral agent for accessibility, it's saying "why should we spend hundreds or thousands of developer hours accommodating less than 1% of the market?"

With rare exceptions, (such as supporting IE6 clones in China) there's no business case for doing so, so it isn't done.

W3 is great, but the very page that information on violates their standards--it's div soup and won't work screenreaders, there are images without descriptions, and even the sidebar is using javascript to open the menu and change classes when it could use pure HTML.

So yes, those best practices are obsolete when the people recommending them can't even be bothered to follow them on their own page.

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