This handles user-settable timeouts without the need for JavaScript and it’s fully accessible. (Note that the site content, the tutorial, is still under development.)

Javascript is great and people who have javascript turn off should suffer,

What a friendly and considerate person you seem to be …

Javascript is great and people who have javascript turn off should suffer, people who have just one eye see less so sites should all be working best in 800×600? javascript allows websites to look better and work better(not refresh with ajax). And by the way nobody cares about people that use just keyboard or some weird browsers(i found many sites that work good only in IE).
You gave only one good argument that Javascript could be insecure, but … IE is also known for that and Firefox had more than one bug.

Finally if a user disables JavaScript, they should expect a poor web browsing experience. JavaScript is the programming platform which has enabled Web 2.0, and revoking JavaScript is akin to staying on your horse because cars are too noisy.

Certainly sounds like they should expect it from you.

So, if I want to use my JS-less phone browser to access your online shopping list app, I shouldn’t be cranky because it can’t operate without Javascript?

Or similarly, if I disabled JS on that phone browser because I didn’t want it to connect to the server (at my expense) every time I ticked an item off the list, and the app then doesn’t work, ‘bad luck’?

Regardless of the fact that if I’d been using the same application 18 months earlier — before it had been ‘improved‘ with AJAX — it would have run perfectly?

Evolution, I say!

I am part of a team developing an ‘Ajax’ Asset Management package. It is a spatial application, whose primary benefit is the ability for ordinary people to be able to visualize their assets. It would make absolutely no sense to provide a version that can be used without a mouse, as spatial input (x,y co-ordinates which are most logically input via a mouse) is critical for its usability.

Finally if a user disables JavaScript, they should expect a poor web browsing experience. JavaScript is the programming platform which has enabled Web 2.0, and revoking JavaScript is akin to staying on your horse because cars are too noisy.

Developing content sites, you are publishing information, that ideally anyone ought to be able to read. But developing web applications can be a rather different animal.

In applications, there is a continuum of possibilities. On one end you have apps like photo editing and Visio, where it might not even be clear what an accessible application for a screen reader would do. On the other end, you have simple applications like a web version of Notepad, where no real functionality would be lost by eliminating client-side interaction altogether. In between, of course, you have an enormous range of cases.

And that’s even without considering building games: for example, web Tetris. Is it evil to build web Tetris? If you build web Tetris, are you responsible for building a version for screen readers that can post back after each action?

As someone responsible for the web port of a Windows application, I can honestly say that I have no idea how to develop a version of my application that could degrade gracefully down to a screen reader. It would require a completely parallel coding solution. I would even be in favor of this option, except that the small company I work for can’t possibly afford this.

I’m certainly with you in spirit, but everyone needs to realize that different types of websites have different situations and impose different practical constraints.