The more I see comments like this, the more convinced I am that there is some sort of conspiracy to restrain and otherwise beat into submission users by forcing them to use hideously overcomplex software that can execute arbitrary code, and which is controlled by effectively two large organisations (one of which already has immense power over the Internet), just to view a website that is nothing more than a static document.

Nothing on that site needs JS. Nothing on that site should need any more than a browser that can display text and images. This isn't a fancy "web application" or other JS-based thing.

It would also be nice if browsers didn't by default auto-execute malware served by any random website, to the point that people think it isn't the website's fault that it breaks when said auto-execution is disabled.

No, you should not intentionally hide text from those who prefer to disable JS. Disabling JS improves site load speed and reduces memory consumption. As a side effect, most of ads and trackers also stop working.

My organisation has a requirement that we build to work without JS. If we need to use JS for something then we also need a non-JS alternative, the result may be less pretty/fast/require an extra call but it works regardless of your JS choices

but that's the problem: the ads and trackers don't work!

unless you're willing to pay them with your data and eyes, they won't let you see the site.

not that I agree with this.

>As a side effect, most of ads and trackers also stop working.

As well as a lot of sites, period.

It would be nice if web developers were responsible enough that disabling Javascript were not necessary.

It would be even nicer if the web were designed with a semblance of sanity.

Websites that require javascript to display basic text/image content are poorly designed

No? Users should be able to decide if they want to run some untrusted code on their machines or not

I agree the user should decide to run the code or not, as well as for the user to replace the code with their own if they want to modify it.

Sometimes scripts can be used to implement something, but just to display text and so on, should not need a script; it should just have the text. (Often they like to put in so many pictures, styles, scripts, etc, that you do not need. Just put the text!)

(Some things might be other protocol and try to make a HTML interface to it, but even then the protocol should be documented without requiring such scripts to read it and you can access it directly and don't have to use their implementation. For example if they use gopher or NNTP or telnet then you can just use those directly and the URL should link to them directly rather than requiring the HTML.)

One thing to do for web pages that use specific scripts is to define a new attribute to specify the unversal ID of a widget or program so that you can more easily substitute your own implementation or use it in web browsers that do not implement JavaScript.

Yeah, everyone should be forced to run arbitrary code on their computers, you tell'em.