I thought it would be pertinent to respond to some points presented by Andrey "Rarst" Savchenko in recent post Progressive Enhancement.
Unlike Rarst, I don't value progressive enhancement very highly and don't agree it's a fundamental principle of the web that should be universally employed. Quite frankly, I don't care about not supporting JavaScript, and neither does virtually anyone else. It's not that it doesn't have any value, or utility - but in a world where we don't have unlimited resources and time, one has to prioritise what we'll support and not support.
I'm a proponent of putting my ideas and creations into the world for people to make use of; and if I had to cover 100% of use cases for doing that, I wouldn't put much out there. I'm fine with losing the 1.1% of users who don't have JavaScript available; just like I'm happy to lose the 5% of users running very old versions of Internet Explorer.
JavaScript is no longer a difficulty for screen readers, search engines or mobile devices, the web is no longer just a collection of text documents with hyperlinks. "Progressive Enhancement" evangelists hold back innovation by working to lowest common denominator theory - allowing technology rather than pragmatism to decide what is best for the users.
It's not that I don't think a site would be better not requiring JavaScript (though that would easily be solved with server side rendering, which makes most of Rarst's points moot) it's because I prioritised other things over providing a JavaScript fallback; like making a REST API console to show API requests, or focusing on the slide animations you see when you hit forward / back in your browser on this website.
I see feelingrestful.com as an experiment (which is also open sourced for others to learn from, adapt and use) and I don't have a huge amount of patience for negativity rather than a discussion of ideas [noted the Rarst's post has been updated here]. Anyone visiting this site will be aware of just how little time I was able to put into it; there's lots of things I'd like to improve, I even listed them (including server side rendering) but there's only so many hours in the day, and I'm perfectly happy with the priorities I chose.
While writing this, I decided to disabled JavaScript and visit some sites that I frequent:
Most of these sites don't fundamentally need JavaScript, netflix is just video objects, bank of america is just HTML forms, facebook is a list of posts to read.
This is what I mean by "no one cares", developing for no-javascript is just typically not a priority and I think shoudn't be. Prioritising on things your target audience will find useful and valuable should be the goal. Depending if you are someone who lives by principles rather than case-by-case pragmatism may dictate where you'll strongly disagree ment me.
Exactly how I feel!