Personally, I just ignore users who disable javascript. If you disable it, it’s your problem.
Sounds like you don’t know how to use JavaScript properly. Those people who are unable to have JavaScript enabled will tell all their friends how useless your site is.
Presumably you don’t want many people to visit your site and are not trying to sell anything or providing an essential service so that people can just go elsewhere. There will probably be many other sites similar to yours that are not broken for some visitors.
I know exactly how to use it and how to provide for users without javascript. I just think it’s a waste of effort on javascript heavy sites.
If I was working with an e-commerce site, I’d put the extra effort in, but for general interfaces that are javascript heavy, I don’t see why I should cater for users that go out of their way to make their browsers not work properly.
*Edit: By this I mean: I don’t think it’s worth spending a huge amount of extra effort for probably like 1-2% of users. Very few users disable javascript, and frankly I don’t think it’s generally worth supporting them.
I also don’t put any effort into supporting ie 6 or 7, and only put minimal effort into supporting ie 8.
That way I get to focus on doing great things that work well for people who are not using broken software to browse my websites.
**Edit 2: Pretty sure pinterest.com doesn’t work at all with javascript turned off. They seem to be doing just fine.
Don’t worry about him. I try to argue that JavaScript is more then just eye candy to him but I give up and that’s his opinion. For example, Google Doc is a great example of using JavaScript as a functionality then accessibility. I completely 100% agree with you and I believe you know how to code WELL in javascript.
There is a difference between a web site (which should be capable of functioning without JavaScript) and a web application such as Pinterest or Google Doc.
Also you can have JavaScript perform extremely sophisticated things on a web page and still provide a clunky workaround for those who have JavaScript turned off. For those who don’t have the option to turn JavaScript on simply having a way for them to use the site no matter how awkward compared to the JavaScript version that it is can prevent court cases and save millions.
Can you give any examples of court cases where people have been fined millions for sites that don’t work with javascript disabled?
I do agree with what you are saying about the distinction between web apps and websites by the way. If I’m working on an e-commerce site, as I’ve said, I will put the extra effort in. I’ll also do it if the site only uses a bit of javascript, but I’m not going to a ton of extra effort if the site is complicated just for the sake of probably 1% of users who have javascript disabled.
The amount of time and effort involved versus the amount of people who actually benefit from it is skewered too much.
It really depends why you are using Javascript. There are some things that just can’t sensibly be coded without it – complex applications like Google Docs are a prime example. There is no practical way to make that kind of functionality without Javascript, and no-one is going to expect you to try. But there are lots of websites that don’t have that excuse – they use Javascript for things that could perfectly well be written in HTML and fail to provide a fall-back option. As often as not, those features turn out to be mind-bogglingly irritating for a lot of users. The increasingly popular but festeringly annoying “eternal scroll” on social media sites and many comments pages is a prime example … they are often broken in so many different ways, but site owners think they are cool so implement them without any consideration of their usability or accessibility. Even if you insist on peddling this kind of rubbish, to not even bother with a non-JS fallback is inexcusably arrogant.
If you think it’s OK to treat your (potential) audience with that kind of contempt then go right ahead, it’s entirely your choice. But don’t be surprised when it comes back to bite you. And with the increasing use of mobile devices, with varying levels of Javascript capability (but rarely the processor capabilty or battery life to survive it), bite you it will.
That certainly sounds easier than what I’m doing: diving into preferences each time.
I also have an issue on another machine where Opera since 12.14+ no longer seems to read the .opera .ini files, and so always loads all the defaults instead of remembering my settings. It’s definitely a bug but it’s not hitting all my copies of Opera, even with the same version number. Confuzling.
My boss is convinced that eternal scroll is good for e-commerce if the user is a woman because “women like to shop” (by “shop” he means browse and look at lots of things before looking further at any one product). This despite the fact that e-commerce has discovered that eternal scroll sucks for anything users are expected to do important interaction with. You can’t search eternal scroll with your browser (and site search may or may not suck mightily). People lose their orientation and can’t easily find products that mildly caught their eye earlier. The appearance of “too many choices” with nothing to separate them lowers people’s buying intentions (as seen in the famous 30-types-of-jam study from Colombia university). Sites like Amazon have stuck to paged results for this reason; Etsy tried forever scroll and abandoned it due to decreased conversion (sales).
For more passive things like reading tweets or facewaste “look here, yet another inspirational image of a bird/sunset/baby with a Bible/Ghandi/Chicken Soup quotation!” shares, eternal scroll is more palatable. Though it still sucks if you’re required to build a web scraper 
Sometimes I wonder if it’s used deliberately to force more developers to use their APIs to grab data.
Re pinterest: I have this strange feeling that a broken Pinterest will cause much less wailing and gnashing of teeth than a broken e-commerce/government/traffic/news site will, regardless of reason.
Support:
Nowadays JS is pretty much either actually turned off, or the site serving it has broken (like Basecamp did), rather than devices not supporting it. Unless you’re specifically dealing with mobile, where there’s usually support but at a very high cost in terms of speed and battery life as StevieD said. What does this mean (besides the fact that asking mobiles to run a metric crap-ton of jQuery on each site is still really dumb)?
It means we can now feel better about ourselves if we exclude a group of people based on how small their minority is, because the reason discrimination feels wrong to us is because people can’t (usually and reasonably) change how they were born/where they came from/what they look like/etc. Someone turning Javascript off is seen as an action and a choice (even if they’re only doing it out of desperation because you the developer made something break/annoying with it in the first place). Someone using a device that simply doesn’t support it, less so, and there are simply fewer of those. Also the importance of what the web page/app/whatever does has changed over the years, as well as users’ expectations. Of those who disable Javascript, most of them no longer reasonably expect sites to work, even in the (majority) cases where lack of some Javascript breaks all sorts of things the Javascript isn’t actually needed for (see Basecamp case, or when hashbangs started getting popular and then whole sites died because retards forgot how to fall back to working-since-forever hrefs). BTW that’s called laziness: even when there’s a good case for Javascript being required, having a small failure somewhere should not cause great and terrible damage. It should simply break what broke. And that means, super-double-gasp, testing, which requires un-laziness. (yeah, I’m too lazy to look up the antonym)
I’ll take an edjumacated guess, and say there are exactly 0.000 such cases. We’re lucky enough to have a bit of law to use as a last resort to force large wealthy companies to take down their “no blind or deaf allowed” signs; asking for similar for an obscure-to-everyone-not-a-nerd technology would make a film possibly worthy of The Room.
Besides, the argument is backwards: instead of not doing something costing someone a fine, it should be “doing X to increase conversions” instead. Making something break in fewer cases is logically better; you only need to know how much more money you would potentially earn so you can decide if it can exceed the developer costs.
If your developers are getting paid peanuts because they’re living in a developing country, then the calculation starts getting really easy.
If, on the other hand, you’re a (Ruby/node.js/coffeescript/noSQL/whatever-is-WEB-SCALE-today)-using non-profitable hip startup running on free Red Bulls, rockstar/ninja/whatever programmers and vulture capitalists, then it’s probably a big “no”. But this last group doesn’t support IE, know how to write vanilla Javascript, or make anything accessible either.
The only situations I am aware of all settled prior to going to court and so there is no actual record of whether it was specifically JavaScript or some other accessibility problem that was determined to be why the site was unusable by the person taking the action. Also while figures into millions of dollars have been mentioned as the amount of the settlement but again since they never went to court, the actual settlements are unknown. All that is known is that after the settlements the sites each reworked their site to fix accessibility problems including making sure that the site was usable without JavaScript.
That doesn’t mean that there isn’t the potential for someone to claim millions under anti-discrimination laws if a site that they should reasonably expect to be able to use is inaccessible to them because it doesn’t work without JavaScript.
Most sites only get away with being able to have a broken site for those with JavaScript turned off because there are plenty of alternative sites that provide the same thing and which actually test their web sites to make sure they work for all of their potential visitors. Those sites will of course get far more visitors than the broken ones.