If you haven't got the experience, then yes, it's going to seem like two times the work. But I am a low vision user who disables JavaScript often because developers don't understand that jut because I stopped moving my mouse doesn't mean I want to see a popup definition of the word I hovered on which obscures my viewport. (I'm zoomed in now as I type this).<p>I'm saddend (and a little angry) at the number of developers here who absolutely insist it's so much extra work to build a site that doesn't require JavaScript. If you follow best practices, it's not a big deal. Web apps create, retrieve, update, and delete records. No matter how fancy your new startup's idea is, you have to realize that it's all the same task over and over again, and you can do that with simple web forms that don't require AJAX. A little unobtrusive JS to capture clicks, hide boring interfaces, and transform your dull non-JS interface can go a LONG way. Plus you can test that the underlying functionality of your site works <i>very</i> early.<p>I'm required by law (Section 508) to build accessible web sites at my day job. It's much easier to make Section 508 compliant websites without JS. Then we put the icing on the cake to satisfy the other 98% of our users.
It obviously depends on 1) who your target audience is, and 2) what your website is.<p>If the target is HN type people I'm guessing the number of non-Javascript goes up.<p>If the website is pure information, why not provide it even to people who telnet to port 80?<p>But if the website is a rich interactive application, even if it could fall back on simple form submissions, I'd say it's fair that non-JS users sees a "This requires Javascript" message.<p>(my answer is very different if the "interactive application" was powered with something vendor/platform-specific)
I'm a NoScript user and generally only whitelist JS on sites I use all the time and trust. I'm not overly paranoid about security, but the experience on the web with NoScript is far superior than without it in my opinion. What drives me absolutely insane is when a website is 100% useless unless JS is whitelisted. That instantly gets put on my list of sites to never ever go to again.
I use NoScript mainly due to the prevalence of XSS attacks. If a website doesn't require me to enable javascript, even a trusted website, I wont. All it does is open you up to XSS attacks. Lets not forget that google, facebook, twitter, paypal, hotmail, yahoo and countless other big name websites have all fallen prey to these flaws, and will continue to fall prey to them.
The follow-up question is "Why users disable JS?".<p>How many do it unintentional because they think JS is Java(applets ...), or the browser does not support it.<p>I'm also wondering how many people change the advanced JS settings in the browser (do browser other than Firefox even support them?).<p>I'm one of those 2% for different reasons(open for discussion):
- it blocks 90% of ads, because most banners are JS driven
- I consider JS as a privacy and security vulnerability
- disabled JS saves bandwidth<p>It never takes more than 2 seconds to get an idea if a page does work without JS, and another 2 seconds to decide if it is worth it to enable JS.
NoScript has 74,459,688 downloads so far (<a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722/</a>). You'd have to do some calculations with this to get closer to a real user number, though ;)<p><i>I'd wager that the average NoScript user has at least two machines, so the total number of NoScript users is probably less than 2.7 million.</i>
(<a href="http://blog.brandonbloom.name/2010/06/noscript-add-on-install-base.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.brandonbloom.name/2010/06/noscript-add-on-instal...</a>)
If your website relies on JavaScript to work, then you're excluding people who <i>can't</i> use JavaScript. Disabled people with screen readers.<p>If you don't cater for those people, put some money aside for lawyers.
Could the argument be made that the minority who surf with Javascript disabled don't necessarily have to be catered to, since they will enable Javascript if they trust the site or find it useful?