I've long considered websites that fail to do this to be poorly engineered.
Looking at it from a business perspective, it's also a matter of cost. How big a percentage of people have JS off (I searched a bit and everything suggests low single digits, 1-2%), versus how much time do I spend making sure the site is somewhat functional to serve these people. And does somewhat functional make sense? Can they see my site but they can't go into my sales funnel without me making HTML-equivalent pages? In that case why would I bother unless that percentage of users grows to where it becomes financially interesting to me?
Still, would be nice if most sites would at least render some plain HTML fallback with a bit of info, instead of a single line on a white page saying "this doesn't work".
I don't understand what you mean here.
> Looking at it from a business perspective
Which, I suppose, is the underlying problem. In my opinion, the drive to turn websites into revenue generators has had a corrosive effect on the entire web. I suppose that I just have to accept that increasing portions of the web are going to be hostile and to be avoided. It just saddens me, as so much -- perhaps a majority -- of the web is already more of a security risk than I can bear.
> Still, would be nice if most sites would at least render some plain HTML fallback with a bit of info, instead of a single line on a white page saying "this doesn't work".
More info is better than less info, but either way, the page still won't work.
While I agree, there is the other side of that. They are very very expensive. Even a simple site needs servers, and devs.
> More info is better.
For who? If I tell the 2% of people out there that I sell these awesome things and they attempt to purchase them, but they can't because they have JS off, who did that knowledge help?
Now if it cost me 10k to tell the 2% they're waisting their time here, I'm out 10k and they're no better off than when they got a blank page.
It also walls an increasing amount of the web off from those of us who reject JS because of the security risks it brings.
I'd actually say it's good engineering.
If I engineer a small gas can (for filling my lawn mower) I can build one that holds a gallon, or one that holds 5 gallons. Now 2% of the population that owns lawn mowers have massive yards and riding mowers. So which one do I engineer? Which do I build. I build for the 98%
Optimist says cup is half full
Pessimist says cup is half empty
Engineer says cup is twice the size it has to be.
The reality. Building for the 2% just isn't an effective use of resources.
-- Oh oh.. I got a better one..
-- How many bridges in your home town have allowance for horses. Are all the bridge builders bad engineers?
Such move is harmful for the society and must end before it's too late. We must came back to classic desktop computing and punishing all evolution that try to lock users. Modern web(cr)apps fall in this very category.
It's very asinine for instance forcing people's on crappy bloated banking portals instead of agree around a common and standard API (like SEPA OpenBank) leaving users using their favorite local app where all transactions are locally stored, digitally signed by the bank so source of truth in user hand, always available, with as many banks as users want under a common user-chosen UI. No need for crappy monsters WebVM, no need for gazillion of resources just to keep pushing around garbage mostly used for surveillance. The same apply to taxes and pretty anything else.
Personally I like reading post with Firefox reader just to avoid being distracted by the crap added to most websites, if a website does not render in Reader or without js I simply avoid it.
To me, the browser is an application platform. That it originated as a document viewer is historical trivia.