I think it’s mostly due to a “It looks and functions good to me the way I visit the site” coupled with a “if it doesn’t look and function good to you, it’s your fault for not having the same browsing environment I have. Don’t blame me” attitude.
I’m always bemused by the fact that these messages now seem to include a link to a “how to enable JS” page. If somebody has chosen to disable it, then presumably they know how to enable it again, too. If they have no control over the situation, then the link is pointless. It almost feels like a “get-out” clause for the designer: “We tried to fix your problem for you; it’s no longer our responsibility”.
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Okay now I’m going really off-topic : P
They should just be more honest and straightforward and make it a F-You sign.
I don’t mind it though when the message is “This site relies on a lot of Javascript. Please either turn Javascript on or try our (whatever, mobile, “plain HTML”) site instead”.
It reminds me to either refresh the page if JS got b0rked, or to whitelist/temp allow the site when I switch to a blocking JS browser. I don’t need to be told how to enable JS but I do sometimes need to be told that it didn’t load for whatever reason or that there’s another, lower-bandwidth version available I can use.
Same with cookies: I don’t mind a site saying “hey we use cookies and they do this and that” so long as they also have a “no, I accept a possibly degraded site experience by not accepting cookies.” I’m rather unhappy with sites that try to follow the EU cookie law by making a big popup stating “we use cookies!” while not actually educating the user or offering any choice.
Most of the Dutch newspaper sites force you to accept cookies to read their static text that doesn’t need cookies to function, because they want to track you, which goes against the original idea of the cookie law: let people choose.
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Quite. I accept that when I’m browsing on my phone, or if I have turned off scripts or cookies, there may be some more advanced features that are not available. That’s fine. If they can’t reasonably be made to work on my setup then I’ll have to go without. If there is no reasonable way that an alternative accessible arrangement can be developed, that’s not a problem – I know that there are some things that do need to use advanced technology. But when it’s content that could very easily be made accessible (usually by just not putting whatever damnfool gadgetry on it that they have chosen to use) and is not, that is when I get annoyed, and refuse to go back to the site when I’m at a computer than can access it. Buzzfeed and The Onion are on my boycott list for that very reason.
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