This just boils down to a question of understanding your audience and communicating with them appropriately. The simple takeaway is that disabling JavaScript tends to correlate with tech savvy, and so addressing these users as non-technical comes off as condescending and results in blog posts like these.
If I'm building something JS-only, I try to speak the NoScript user's language when writing the error copy, even attempting to build a bit of rapport, like here: http://presteign.com
[EDIT] Something has apparently gone wrong in the last couple of days with the dynamic content loading on the site linked above, so I've put a maintenance page in its place. The <noscript> message was: This site needs JavaScript enabled to work. At least it's not Flash, right?
There is no info what I'm missing. Anyway I tried to take a look at it:
Enabled the site in NoScript and all I get is a very buggy menu. OK, lets give you cookies, real referrer, etc. Still not working??
Just for you, I've made a brand-new Firefox 11 profile with no extensions and all default settings. The site refreshes every second, spewing warnings in the JS console. It looks broken and I still don't know what it is about.
Whether a site this simple really needs JS is another discussion...
While you were busy building a rapport with the handful of noscript visitors you forgot to test your site on the iPhone. Your site actually locks up Mobile Safari on iPhone 4S with the latest iOS. I have to manually kill the browser and restart it!
Wow, thanks for calling my attention to that – it's actually not just iOS; something has gone terribly wrong with the dynamic content loading (it's the same on every browser). It worked fine for five months and was working a few days ago; something must have changed on the server.
It's up again. Turns out it was an .htaccess I had mistakenly pulled out of the webroot a few days ago. The JS couldn't resolve any of its AJAX, and I didn't build it to fail the calls gracefully.
If I'm building something JS-only, I try to speak the NoScript user's language when writing the error copy, even attempting to build a bit of rapport, like here: http://presteign.com
[EDIT] Something has apparently gone wrong in the last couple of days with the dynamic content loading on the site linked above, so I've put a maintenance page in its place. The <noscript> message was: This site needs JavaScript enabled to work. At least it's not Flash, right?