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Comment on Ask HN: Why do you disable JavaScript?parent

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Most small business aren't rolling their own website. They are contracting the work out or just buying a prepackaged product from someone. If that person's work is so shoddy that I can't see anything about them, well then I'm glad I cannot possibly be a customer.

I'm not asking people to go days out of their way to make their websites work perfectly for people who don't use JavaScript, but please use basic best practices for website layout so I can at least have some idea of what your website is about.

> I'm not asking people to go days out of their way

But you are. If you've made the design decision to support progressive enhancement, testing a fallback for each individual element being enhanced is a minimum marginal cost. If you've made the decision to simply require JavaScript, many tasks get substantially easier and you eliminate a large fixed cost as well as the small variable cost.

But let's say, for sake of argument, that any site could magically be made to work JavaScript-free by the wave of a wand and 15 minutes passage of time.

You're still too small of a minority to justify 15 minutes for most people. Several years ago, Yahoo generously identified you as approximately 1% of global visitors across all user agents. Now consider that most visitors come from a refer with some context, so you already have some idea about what content you'll be seeing. If you don't care enough to enable JavaScript, your probably unlikely convert. If 2/3 of you turn JavaScript on (also generous) and typical conversion rates are 20% (very generous), you're looking at about 0.1% of total visitors.

Furthermore, as you prove, the category of people who disable JavaScript deeply overlaps with the category of people who haphazardly call other people's hard work "shoddy". These people make annoying customers.

You're simply not worth it.

You are again missing my point. I'm not asking for the site to work in the sense that I can do even 5% of the intended functionality. I just want to be able to see something to sell me on why I should enable JavaScript.

Also 15 minutes to convert 0.1% could (and most likely will) still be worth it. There is no magical number for this. A myriad of factors come into play. You can't just issue a blanket statement that I am not worth it when you have no idea what I am worth or the worth greatly changes from site to site.

Requiring JavaScript for your website is not a deal breaker for me. Requiring JavaScript to see a single pixel of the website is what I am complaining about.

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