Hmm...this has me thinking, maybe I'll change up my Hugo site a little, so that there's no dropdown menu - it's the only thing javascript is needed for.

Thank you for this, some points that I'd not even considered, and a helpful reminder to myself to try and get that javascript from 99% to 100% unused. :)

Note there's a group of users that larger than the group of users without JS (for whatever reason): users of assistive technology. And they don't even have a choice.

While I'm all for considering the needs of every user... If you get to the point where you're worrying about no-JS users, I hope you've already considered the needs of people with disabilities, whether temporary or permanent.

Edit: oh right, wanted to add: just making a site work without JS doesn't automatically make it accessible to people with special needs.

Not to mention, more accessible.

People should not be prioritizing no-JS users. No one turns off JavaScript.

If you keep the JS to a minmum, you have

1. less work maintining that shit, HTML/CSS is patient
2. better user experience

So much forms and textboxes don't save content anymore after a reload, because it's dynamically loaded from somewhere or even a frame handled entirely by JS. Buttons/Checkboxes that don't work, it's sad.

Lmao, oh yes, let's go back to the golden age of every app having all of its logic running on centralized servers, rather being able to easily create cross platform client side distributed applications.

The "no-js" philosophy is fundamentally at odds with a future of distributed, OS agnostic, application development.

It remembers the web when the web was simpler, and ignores that that was the era of dll hell and applications being locked to specific OSes. The modern web is the most successful cross platform development framework by orders of magnitude,it's all based on open internationally agreed on standards, and it is vastly simplifying and detangling the overall computing environment / platforms that we used to be locked to.

Just use a framework like Nextjs or it's open source off shoots / clones and get the best of both static pre rendering and dynamic on the fly rendering.

Sadly, the rise of frameworks and SAAS have really killed security and accessibility through enforcement of JS.

'Back in the day' performance, download size, backwards compatibility, and non-js functionality was expected. Now it's not even on the radar for most big corps/agencies. Many places I've worked don't even care about responsiveness, which is crazy.

Now, there are so many 25mb websites that are unusable without JS or the right device...

The point is: a lot of people browsing your site will at least temporarily have a no-JS experience without intentionally doing so.

💯

JavaScript sucks. I hate using it I hate coding it.

I whitelist js sources on my personal computer.

Only absolutely necessary for function scripts get loaded.

If they ask me to disable the adblocker I blacklist the domain.

Can confirm I’m one of those people with JS off and a pretty strict whitelist !

A lot of people who shared this sentiment were hung up on the idea that “no one turns off JS.” But some people do, for a variety of good reasons!

What % are we talking about? 50%, 25%, 10%, 1%, 0.1%? People make choices, but those are their choices. I need to get the job done and I can't cater to everyone's needs.