As a person who is often in a network that enforces very aggressive active content blocking I am very sympathetic to the idea of penalizing content that does not work well without javascript. This said, I do not know how that policy would be reliably implemented.

The linked post suggests banning all content on a domain/site after content which does not render in basic html is submitted and continuing until that site appeals the determination. I don't think that would be a good idea as 1) it may hide content which non-HN users produce and would not otherwise know to appeal and 2) penalize broader domains due to bad content produced by say a single user posting to a multiuser site.

I also wonder what would count as not being usable in plain html. Sure there are obvious examples like the article the post links to which display zero content but what about all of the in-between spaces. As an example, what if a site has textual content viewable as plain html but also very informative figures/demonstrations that require javascript to make some of the points in the piece. Would this content be removed if it was partially unviewable and meaningful information is lost?

If folks do want to move forward with some kind of penalization of content perhaps it would be better to agree to vote down this content as a community practice or have a per submitted article flag that either ads a tag of shame [requires JS] to the title or removes only that single article rather than broader domain/site bans that are permanent until appealed.

Maybe it's worth trying to force the change, but if enough people are able to view the content and like it enough to vote it up perhaps we should also just leave it alone and just deal with the consequences of choosing not to run javascript and let everybody just view potentially valuable content that they can see.