Responsive design and JavaScript

No.

"Graceful degradation" and "progressive enhancement" have mostly been utter failures. Yes, they're possible, and a few sites and designers even manage to do them well without spending wads of money. But, for everyone else, it just represents an additional layer of effort without any direct benefit to themselves.

There's a point at which we should accept that our pontifications about the "ideal" design, engineered for every conceivable device and screen resolution and software platform, is just completely impractical for the majority of designers and developers.

Developers already are expected to make sites work:

- with and without Javascript;

- with IE 6 - 8, Firefox 2 - 7, Safari, Opera, Chrome, and every other two-bit browser out there;

- with readable text and fonts on systems that may or may not have particular or even common fonts installed, including Linux which can render even decent fonts nearly illegible and including the font-weight differences between MacOS and Windows;

- on screen resolutions varying from 800 x 600 to OMG x AreYouKiddingMe, without horizontal scrolling or wasting lots of screen real estate;

- without compromising people with disabilities or screen readers.

Did I miss anything?

I think these are unrealistic expectations, and I submit as evidence the great majority of websites online -- including the professionally-designed ones -- which fail catastrophically on at least one of those points.

Now, we're to be expected to make these same sites, using the same general design, work on devices with ittybitty screens and radically different physical interfaces?

No.

Here's what I hope happens instead: I hope that the concept of the CMS gets extended a little bit and begins to do a better job of abstracting the content from the design, so that sites can easily manage two or more completely different presentations designed for specific devices. (I understand Wordpress already does something like this?)

You'll have your blog or what-have-you, and your blog will have a mobile version, and a desktop version, and they will be completely and totally 100% separated from and independent of each-other.

Because any attempts to make a desktop design work at all on mobile devices without compromising the advantages of the desktop is going to result in much gnashing of teeth.

edit: I meant to add that I think the "right" way to do this is to continue to make the desktop version of a site the default, at least for now, and then check the user-agent of the request on the server. Let the server handle which layout to serve up, not Javascript, and if a mobile user changes the user-agent on their mobile browser to something which will break sites, then they should expect to get broken sites.