it's 2012 and you should just enable javascript.
If you have a site, it's your choice to either ignore us (like the Google Blogs) or not, but if you don't want to, then the author has a point: tells us why, not how.
Just who is needing who here ?
I may have profited from the content, but I surely have generated revenue for the site operator. And I want a part of it, isn't that reasonable for my time and cost? I'm just as much a capitalist as the site owner. I know my visit to their site has value to them, regardless of the content.
We could argue whether they paid me enough in content. But the automatic assumption that this is true isn't acceptable. In fact, the worst and most successful offenders in this business model usually provide the lowest value and often no value at all. See link farms and other blog spam/scams.
If it isn't obvious: this is a thought experiment. I'm not actually demanding my 0.0037 cents/view.
Then say that, don't be a condescending prick. It's ok if you're not interested in that part of the market, just buy a pair of balls and say it.
Out of curiosity, what are those reasons? Related to privacy? Annoyed by animation?
* Obnoxious and gratuitous animations - yep, that too.
* Pop-up/floating/video ads - static or near-static ads are fine. However, if it covers up the content, or makes a noise, it can go die in a fire.
* Badly-written scripts, or pages where there's half-a-dozen+ streaming video ads, can bring my creaky old laptop to its knees.
* There's a possibility (albeit small) of security holes in the browser's scripting engine.
* Personally, I consider graceful degradation a metric of the quality of a website - if it craps out without good reason, that reflects poorly on its owner, and is going to make me suspicious of the quality of their product.
I'm sure there's more, but that's all that spring to mind for me at the moment.
The only times I can see the need for Javascript is to enable something totally compelling that requires the use of it - like an amazing animation that needs JS, or something like this.
In my opinion with the multitude of great new JS libraries (particularly knockout, backbone etc) and JS browser features we're going past it being as simple as progressively enhancing your site. If you are a startup trying to do things in a lean fashion it must be hard to justify.
This is highly dependent on a number of factors, mostly:
* The kind of site we're talking about, if this is a real-time chat application it makes sense that it can't work without JS, if this is a company site or a presentation site for an appstore application with an embedded video and you can't make it work without JS you don't know what you're doing.
* Whether this was considered from the beginning or whoever built the site just went wild with javascript without consideration.
And even in the first section of the first case, if the unlogged account-less front page can't work without javascript I'll probably still think you don't know what you're doing.