Communication without that symbol is not so difficult if you work for it. I can usually do it orally if I try, although it's most straightforward with typing. As HN participants might know, lipography is a strong tradition which boasts many amusing artifacts (including famous books, of which Christian Bök's is most obviously worth buying).
I'd think things would go similarly with Javascript. :-) If you don't want AJAX and local tasks such as validation, you can still construct practical stuff without it.
(Most of my oral discussions with folks work practically without using Javascript... I'm not as optimistic about my browsing, though!)
"Good job! I sought to say what I thought about your post in a similar fashion, but I found it wasn't as straightforward in actuality as it was in my anticipation."
This constraint is not what you could call most hard of all constraints that folks can comply with in writing. Many moons ago, I had many chats with a smart woman (an IT industry analyst, nowadays a VC!) using only four-symbol words (words just as long, or just as short, as "full" and "with"). All right, it wasn't always an option for us to comply fully with standard grammar; a substantial fraction of our writing did consist of partial phrasings (lacking a noun, or lacking an additional pars orationis, as folks would say in Latin -- say, "good work" and not "that's a good job"). Still, that woman and I could chat for a fairly long duration in this fashion, about a surprisingly broad array of topics.
I wish I had logs of our chats now, inasmuch as that constraint is fairly hard... I do think I said "Good Airs" in such a chat as a way of naming a capital city of a country south of Brazil. But much that I said is hard to think of now.
For folks following this discussion, I don't know about Anglic works, but I think "la disparition"[0] and "All'alba Shahrazad andrà ammazzata"[1] show outstanding illustrations of lipograms for Italians and Gauls.
Also, at MIT's annual January puzzling match, I had fun solving this most-common-thousand-words thing (it has a list of cool stuff that you can study at MIT if you want to know how to build flying things... but all in most-common-thousand-words-only fashion).
Links aren't usually one of the things you expect to require javascript for, although obviously in some cases when the page tries to override default window/tab management (hissboo) it makes sense. It's more like disallowing images, and all the text shows up right-to-left. Maybe I'm just a grumpy old person, but I'm tired of people overengineering things. Your website isn't super-special and it doesn't need its own javascript "viewer application". Then again, I'm aware I'm well outside the mainstream in holding that opinion.
I wish browsers had options to display memory and CPU usage per tab, right on the tab. That would end a lot of BS real quick... "Why does this website look so bland, yet uses 20 times the resources of this other, fast, and pretty site?"
If all websites that don't really need javascript for anything but bling that makes marketeers happy and users miserable got rid of it tomorrow, worldwide, I wonder how many coal power plants could be shut down?
There is one way to find out, and one step to get there is to not put up with this nonsense anymore. Driving a car with the handbrakes on to get a pack of cigarettes is not modern, not progress, not sophisticated, and not exactly dignified either.
As someone that develops websites for a living, I think making sites accessible to everyone is my number one priority. It would be one thing if the site said, "you need to enable javascript to view content" but this site just says, "page not found."
Also, I don't appreciate the sarcastic tone of your comment. It's not necessary and I can see by the comments below that you are wrong and out of line.
Why is javascript "critical" here? It's really critical, as in there's no other way to go from viewing one set of text to another set of text on a page without javascript?
This site cannot be reproduced without images or the letter "e". It can be reproduced without javascript. Trivially.
