Ask HN: Is the web ready to require JavaScript?

what kind of browser nowadays don't support javascript? I don't know about you but the idea just sounds totally foreign to me. I'm too busy worrying about what HTML5 features modern browsers support :P.

Well the main issue isn't that browsers don't support Javascript, but that some people disable running scripts or have plugins like noscript that disallow scripting.

Curl doesn't support JavaScript. Neither does wget.

If I'm on a netbook, tablet, or phone, your JavaScript will chew my battery. I don't want that.

I don't trust you. Don't take it personally; I don't trust most websites. I haven't signed your key, and you haven't signed mine. I am not okay with letting you execute code on my machine.

Your JavaScript sucks. Again, don't take it personally; it's a tricky and frustrating language with lots of pitfalls. However, you messed up, and now your script is busy-looping or eating bandwidth with endless AJAX. I'm blacklisting your script until you fix it.

These are just off the top of my head, BTW.

Edit: Spelling.

In either case, your app should be written as a service which can be access by many different "clients" if necessary. Then you can go all hog wild with a WebGL version of your app, and someone else (an intern) can come in later and write a Web 1.0 version of the client-side.

Right, when I was with Marriott we did extensive research of the subject. The numbers just don't add up. Now that I am on my own, I recommend to my clients that they take full advantage of the tools at hand. Butchering the development model to support less that 1% (it was a little higher when I was there around 1.5%) just cannot be justified. Further it is cheaper to build a clean modern code base and then route the non-JS traffic to a site built independent of the modern code base that supports non-JS client. The reality was that the business case could not be made to even spend the development effort to build out a non-JS site. It would have literally been cheaper to send ever non-JS user a new computer with a modern browser, than it would have been to spend the development effort to build the site. Graceful degradation to non-JS creates more complexity and increases the overall effort, when quantified that money is almost always better spent on a better returning effort like an IOS app or further features on the JS enabled site. Now days it is hard to make the numbers work to support a non-JS site. Personally, even if I had no other features to implement, I would spend the money saved from removing the complexity of graceful degradation, on color blind testing, site reader software testing for the blind or internationalization. All of which have better business cases than non-JS support.

While I am on the subject my group (the web) made the business case that having JSP and Javascript was redundant and added to the complexity and therefore the cost of development and maintenance. We where able to successfully transition away from back-end web frameworks two a pure JS/HTML/CSS front end. In doing so we where able to simplify our development model, which increased our defect resolution time as well as our new feature development time.