Most sites are not gmail, they're not even close. Decoupling JS, particularly if it's done just to ensure the tiny fraction of people who disable it can use the site, can rightfully be very low on the priority list if it is a non-trivial engineering cost.

Granted there are some cases where it is an acceptable decision to get yourself into the problem (because the advantages you gain by doing so are worth the costs). But often companies just create the problem for themselves for no good reason - they could have avoided becoming dependent on javascript to do stuff they didn't need to do in a way that broke (degraded un-gracefully) if javascript wasn't available.

You can't seriously be implying it takes more time to write functional HTML than JS. One requires the other to work, when you flip it around it's bad design.

yeah like writing basic html is so hard and more expensive than maintaining piles of js code.

You're essentially maintaining a second UI that is divorced from your main UI. There's significant cost in that. It's the same reason most sites don't support IE6 anymore.

A lot of others keep telling me "but you're missing out on tons of cool stuff", to which I reply "most of what JS is used for, I do not find 'cool'."

- autocomplete of e-mail addresses

- collapsing/expanding nested e-mail conversations

- search suggestions

- navigating your inbox while simultaneously composing a new e-mail

Actually, I agree with both sides of a debate here: progressive enhancement is a really great idea and moreover it's completely insane to require JS and lots of potentially buggy and maybe even harmful JS libraries just to see what the page is about. On the other hand, non-JS and JS-based designs and implementations are just too different to be developed together - I know, I tried, multiple times - and what you really get is a blatant violation of DRY principle and twice as high cost.

In short, until we have a set of non-JS components (HTML5 new input types are an example), which are common and make it possible to translate JS-based design to non-JS one without whole page redesign, we're going to see people over-relying on JS and not providing alternatives. Which sucks.

http://webaim.org/standards/508/checklist

An application written in C++ can be compiled to run optimally on the host OS.

I wonder if this will be our equivalent to the CSS aversion of yesteryear

You will be shocked to see most pages on the internet load almost instantly the second you disable JS instead of spending several seconds loading all sorts of non-content.

The performance gain of disabling JS is immense.

My record is around 40+.

I don't know why do they need that many. See reddit, loads 2 I think.

(That said, I will turn off CSS on a page that abuses it; the majority of them don't, it's not a security risk, and it makes the page look better most of the time, so no problems with having it on by default.)

Do people abuse javascript? Absolutely! However, I think JS can make the page look much better. Ajax loads are quicker than page refreshes, autocomplete is very useful, reply boxes that are loaded inline on demand, Hiding of parts of the page if the user wants to, (long comment threads...) table headers that scroll with the table, etc, etc. The really crummy thing about JS is it has gotten so much negative attention because of the abuses and that's what people focus on.

I really don't like the move to JS dialogs myself though. I don't think that they are beneficial to the user in many cases. Especially when a video or picture is displayed in a JS dialog.

In other words, CSS won't just sit there and consume CPU cycles unless you actively interact with the page, unlike JS. The highest-voted comment on the first answer there says that a bit more explicitly.