That's up to each user to decide. We (NoScript users) have our reasons to keep it disabled by default. You may not agree with them, but it's our choice.
If you have a site, it's your choice to either ignore us (like the Google Blogs) or not, but if you don't want to, then the author has a point: tells us why, not how.
Let me let you in on a little secret. We don't want you. I'm dead serious. If you're blocking our ads, and not even allowing us to count you as a visitor by blocking our analytics code, we'd really just as soon NOT have you burning up our server's CPU and using our bandwidth.
I supplied electricity, a computer, internet connection, and a virtual machine to run code in (that's a business model by itself).
I may have profited from the content, but I surely have generated revenue for the site operator. And I want a part of it, isn't that reasonable for my time and cost? I'm just as much a capitalist as the site owner. I know my visit to their site has value to them, regardless of the content.
We could argue whether they paid me enough in content. But the automatic assumption that this is true isn't acceptable. In fact, the worst and most successful offenders in this business model usually provide the lowest value and often no value at all. See link farms and other blog spam/scams.
If it isn't obvious: this is a thought experiment. I'm not actually demanding my 0.0037 cents/view.
While TylerE's response is a bit brash, I agree to a similar point. Web dev teams these days rarely consider the noscript crowd an important user base and simply code along without regard, heavily reliant on javascript. They don't need to be able to track users by Google Analytics (and maybe GA is the source of paranoia for some) or animate navigation, but modern sites are often built with the intent to show off their javascript muscle these days.
* Obnoxious and gratuitous animations - yep, that too.
* Pop-up/floating/video ads - static or near-static ads are fine. However, if it covers up the content, or makes a noise, it can go die in a fire.
* Badly-written scripts, or pages where there's half-a-dozen+ streaming video ads, can bring my creaky old laptop to its knees.
* There's a possibility (albeit small) of security holes in the browser's scripting engine.
* Personally, I consider graceful degradation a metric of the quality of a website - if it craps out without good reason, that reflects poorly on its owner, and is going to make me suspicious of the quality of their product.
I'm sure there's more, but that's all that spring to mind for me at the moment.
Privacy and security (XHR and CSRF are still two of the most common security flaws on websites) is definitively one of the reasons, but I think the most important one for me is having the habit of keeping (many) dozens of tabs opened - and sometimes opening a dozen or more within a few seconds, like when reading HN - while using a single-core 1.6GHz laptop. Heavy JS can bring it to its knees.
With respect, the "it's 2012..." argument should really go like this: "it's 2012, and you should be able to develop a website without any real need for Javascript."
The only times I can see the need for Javascript is to enable something totally compelling that requires the use of it - like an amazing animation that needs JS, or something like this.
I think you're underestimating the amount of work that is required to cater for those with JS turned off, each new feature would need to keep that in mind, it would need to be designed for and UX tested. Scenarios where you wan to rely on javascript need to have a fallback, each change needs to be tested in a noscript environment.
In my opinion with the multitude of great new JS libraries (particularly knockout, backbone etc) and JS browser features we're going past it being as simple as progressively enhancing your site. If you are a startup trying to do things in a lean fashion it must be hard to justify.
> I think you're underestimating the amount of work that is required to cater for those with JS turned off
This is highly dependent on a number of factors, mostly:
* The kind of site we're talking about, if this is a real-time chat application it makes sense that it can't work without JS, if this is a company site or a presentation site for an appstore application with an embedded video and you can't make it work without JS you don't know what you're doing.
* Whether this was considered from the beginning or whoever built the site just went wild with javascript without consideration.
And even in the first section of the first case, if the unlogged account-less front page can't work without javascript I'll probably still think you don't know what you're doing.
This ties back to the point of the submission -- if you can't make your site work without JS, at least tell the users with JS disabled why you need them to let yours through.
