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Comment by __alexs | Hacker News Reader

"Friendly reminder that "people with JS disabled" includes those on high-latency networks, bad firewalls, and browsers you don't support." - @jcoglan

https://twitter.com/jcoglan/status/370173041193406464

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And people using NoScript.

And who cares about people using NoScript, no one should. They are in the vast minority, not worth the trouble accommodating for them.

And they know they're using NoScript. If the website doesn't work, they can decide if they want to enable or not. It's their burden, not mine.

Unless, of course, my client wants a 100% working no-script webapp/site. Then I'll happily charge for the extra time building it.

You may want to use a pseudonym for work where you cut corners and failed to do work you're actually prepared to do properly. I browse without javascript enabled to judge the quality of the tools I'm considering; I wouldn't hire anyone with a portfolio full of broken non-semantic documents.

It's not "cutting corners". It does take more time to build an webapp that works without any JS.

If it takes more time, the final product costs more. The client should be aware of that and make the decision. Why should he/she always pay for something that will only be useful for a very small % of his/hers clients?

A minority that is growing quite fast , people are not stupid prepare for the javascript backlash like Flash hate wave. If your content is not worth it , if i need javascript just to read some text , if you dont explain why i should turn javascript on with a noscript tag ,then you'll lose me and many more as an audience.

Do you have any statistics to back up your assertion that it's growing? From what I've seen from my own anecdotal experience, as well as from access logs from past places I've worked, this minority is vanishingly small (<0.5%, even among those using screen readers it's ~1.5%) and shrinking by the day as more mobile devices support javascript.

Regardless, there is no right or wrong answer in general, there is only the right or wrong answer for your particular website/market. If a significant number of the users you want to support have JS disabled, then by all means, build a site that runs without JS. But it's a cost-benefit analysis. For most sites I've worked on, the cost of lost business due to users without JS is (massively) dwarfed by the added development cost of building a full-featured app that doesn't require JS. If that means I lose you as a customer, I'm not losing sleep over it.

How do you differentiate a user using NoScript from a bot dismissed as a browser?

If just I look at my logs, more than 90% of the access are from Firefox and don't run Javascript.

What is your website about? Is it a consumer website aimed at teens, moms, father? Or a GNU hacking blog hosted on Jekyll? CONTEXT is key here.

No we will not lose many more. The percentages who actually did something about flash very minuscule and we would lose more by not supporting IE6.

And who cares about people using Mozilla, no one should. They are in the vast minority, not worth the trouble accommodating for them. IE all the way.

And whilst a vanishingly small percentage of people were using Mozilla, why not? If Mozilla wanted to get people to use it, it had to be compatible with (most) of the existing web.

Similarly, I won't be testing my websites in Soguo or Yandex until more than a vanishingly low percentage of people are using them on those sites.

I've thought about this.

If I have a blog or similar media site, and require javascript, I might offer a 15/month option to allow access to a text only interface and an RSS feed. No graphics, no pictures, a very simple link and text interface.

And the moment I start seeing subscriptions coming in, I'll believe in progressive enhancement again.

(Progressive enhancement doesn't affect me as an application developer in the web space. But if it did...)

Interesting, but I think there's probably a large intersection between users who want a text-only interface and users who don't want their browsing habits on your site attached to their name in your database.

Realistically most of your readers will come through links and the like, and thus not be willing to pay a subscription.

If it were a site I frequent, I'd probably be willing to pay $3-4/month for a simple, clean, static html version (no need to remove the pictures though -- I can choose whether to load those client-side). Something like this, say: [http://mnmlist.com/unknown/] I'd only pay 15-20/month if I could get the entire web like that :)

Most likely, at 15/month I'd just not visit your site.

EDIT: PLEASE don't use the navigation from that site though. It's ... way too vertical.

friendly reminder that people using browsers from last century may not be your target demo

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