Conversation

It is wild to me how many relatively-simple websites just utterly break without cookies or without JavaScript. If you have a straightforward article page nobody should need either to read it. I'm not talking about paywalls here, or about complex interactive webapps. Just simple pages anyone should be able to read where the images don't work if you don't have JS turned on. Or nothing at all loads if they can't set a cookie. I don't know who's writing these frameworks which can't even produce basic text-and-pictures HTML without JS, but it feels negligent.

Whatever happened to progressive enhancement? To writing semantic HTML and using CSS to lay it out how you want, and JS only to do the things CSS can't? Even a friendly, usable CMS can spit out semantic HTML which works with your style sheets. What's the structural incentive I'm missing here?