Yes, that's the ideal. Try and do it. Remember to test all the different progressively enhanced paths that only a tiny minority of your users is using.
Do you also take that attitude to your code? I.e. "it's alright, that code path only executes one time out of fifty, doesn't matter that it crashes the program".
That is not what I meant. I meant: “that code path only executes one time out of fifty (thousand), but you have to test it exactly like the core code that runs thousands of times more, so maybe you can drop the feauture since it's used by a handful of users”.
(I have my doubts one in fifty people disable Javascript)
Well now you're talking about an analogy that's 3 orders of magnitude away from what we're actually dealing with, so it doesn't really hold up. BTW, we're not really talking about 'testing' here, either - you don't actually need to test plain HTML beyond the most cursory of glances.
We are talking about people disabling JavaScript in their browser. One in several thousands is still a large over estimation.
[Citation needed]
What a thoughtful and insightful remark. If you don't believe that statement to be in the right ballpark you are out of touch with the world outside HN.