I don't get the people who complain about the website not working with disabled js. Maybe I miss something and a large part of users disable / have js disabled in their browsers for some reason? Why the target audience of the ruby, probably primary web developers, whould do that? Or is this a some kind of secret handshake so community accept you (to build a website that can work with no js)?
It's become a bit of a shibboleth to have js disabled, and brag loudly about how that breaks much of the Internet. It's a weird form of nerd signaling
Back in the 2000s in the web standards development community there were multiple web development strategies called "progressive enhancement", "graceful degradation" and "unobtrusive javascript":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement
There were a lot of practical reasons for that: The browser landscape was much more diverse, different browsers had different support of standard Javascript, some browsers didn't even support JS and some people still kept text-only browsers like lynx/links in mind. Also browsers were not evergreen, so a large part of the audience could be on some older versions. Another thing were sometimes brittle network connection, especially over mobile. Depending on JS could in the case of corruption mean non-functioning websites.
For a lot whose exposure to web development and the discussions abound that, that reason will be stuck in their head, even if in the last decade of React ets the "best practices" will have changed.
There is also an aesthetic thing: There is a thing of beauty in simply curling an url and piping it into grep or such to get the thing you need, instead of having so have an headless browser. In my mind that is still how the web should work.
It's a common philosophy for developers with standards of robustness and accessibility to not hard depend on js for things that don't need js to function.
> Why the target audience of the ruby, probably primary web developers, whould do that?
In my experience, it's mostly web developers who care about this in the first place.
> mostly web developers who care about this in the first place.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. We care about our users and how they use our websites. JavaScript is everywhere and has been the de facto frontend standard for the past few years. Supporting no-JS is starting to feel like supporting a new browser. As much as I’d like to, from a business and product point of view, the numbers are just too small for us to even consider it.
I didn't imply that all web developers care about it, but that most of the people who care about it are web developers. I won't deny that it's still a minority.
I can understand the aspiration to have the system that can be run from the lowest level out of box tools, but then, I am doing frontend for almost a decade and this is porbably the first time I'm seeing such attention to this specific 'no js' use case, as in this thread.
Maybe I'm not reading enough webdev forums. I agree though that things that don't required js should be written in no js way.