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Comment on Ask HN: Why don't websites have 'text only' backup versions?

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What you're describing sounds like an edge case and goes against the design & development methodologies used in today's websites. Rarely are we building things with static content, and we're leveraging the power of AJAX to minimize the number of times a browser must refresh the entire window to load new content.

Current trends aside, from a pragmatic perspective, I would anticipate something like this increasing development costs (labor & money) between 10-50%, and would likely have a very low ROI.

Completely disagree with this.

- Most sites contain static content and are not interactive. Things like simple forms don't really count, in my opinion. - Sites which load static content are in my experience slower as a result of using AJAX, not faster

In fact, I'd argue that there is essentially no additional cost in building a site that uses progressive enhancement for loading content. If anything, my experience is it encourages a much more sensible architecture.

Of course, the value proposition changes when we're looking at interactive web apps, and I agree it's not clear that there's value there.

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