Should web developers continue to spend effort progressively enhancing our web applications with JavaScript, ensuring that features gracefully degrade, thereby ensuring accessibility?  Or should we spend that time focused on new features or other areas of development?

The subtext of that question would be:  How many of our customers/clients/users utilize our websites or applications with JavaScript disabled?  Do you have any projects with requirements that specifically demand JavaScript functionality (almost all of mine do), and do those requirements also demand graceful degradation?

For the sake of asking this question, I pulled up programmers.stackexchange.com without JavaScript enabled, and I was greeted with this message: "Programmers - Stack Exchange works best with JavaScript enabled".  It was difficult to log in, albeit the site seemed to generally work okay.  (I wasn't able to vote up any questions.)

I think this is a satisfactory approach to development.  Imagine the effort involved in making all of the site's features work with plain old HTML and server-side logic. On the other hand, I wonder how many users have been alienated by this approach.

We've all been trained (at least the good developers among us) to use progressive enhancement and to ensure our web applications' dynamic features degrade gracefully.  Is this progressive enhancement just pissing into the wind, or do some of our customers actually utilize certain web services without JavaScript enabled?

I use NoScript but whitelist any site I actually intend to use.


  When you install NoScript, JavaScript, Java, Flash Silverlight and possibly other executable contents are blocked by default. You will be able to allow JavaScript/Java/... execution... selectively, on the sites you trust. You can allow a site to run scripts temporarily, if you're just surfing randomly, or permanently, when you visit it often and you really trust it. This means that NoScript learns from your own browser habits and tends to disappear in the background after a while, but it promptly comes back to save your day if you stumble upon a malicious web page.
  
  When you browse a site containing blocked scripts a notification, similar to those issued by popup blocker, is shown.
  Look at it or at the statusbar icon to know current NoScript permissions...
  
  

