> I certainly do expect my federal, state and local government to follow best practices and provide working websites that I can use without running JS.

Best practices is a moving target. What made sense in 1999 doesn't make sense in 2019. The web simply requires JS, CSS, and HTML today. If you disable any one you aren't compatible.

There's no actual argument for why websites should spend significantly to support a tiny subset of users that intentionally break compatibility for ideological reasons. It is unfair to our other >99% of users who we'd have more time for.

The old arguments such as accessibility aren't correct any longer: accessibility devices specifically support JavaScript (text contrast, HTML organization/order, aria tags, video subtitles, etc remain highly important).

If you really insist on a JavaScript free world you are of course welcome to visit a government office in person, pick up, and mail back a paper form. The website is merely a convenience we offer to you.

Otherwise you'll need an IE 10 or newer browser, on an Operating System that supports TLS 1.1 (Windows Vista or newer), JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.

> Best practices is a moving target. What made sense in 1999 doesn't make sense in 2019.

Sure, but it still makes sense to use JS sparingly. Running untrusted remote code in your browser is a huge nest of attack vectors. I don't think that, in 2019, running JS from the open internet willy-nilly can be described as "best practices", despite the prevalence of it. We're not there yet. If three hundred million people jump off a bridge I'm still not going to do it too.

> The web simply requires JS, CSS, and HTML today. If you disable any one you aren't compatible.

That's, like, your opinion, man.

You're trying to insist that your concept of the Internet is the concept of the Internet. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it's not quite true yet, eh?

> There's no actual argument for why websites should spend significantly to support [non-JS users]

Right, they shouldn't spend more because the tech they use should provide for non-JS users out-of-the box without additional overhead. If devs have chosen NOT to use tech like that then they are at fault, not the user, eh?

> for ideological reasons.

What about for security reasons?

> It is unfair to our other >99% of users who we'd have more time for.

But the reason you have to "spend significantly" to do the right thing is that you chose to use and deploy crappy JS frameworks, not that some people refuse to run your crappy frameworks. This is classic "blame the user".

Now, this is your prerogative if you're doing your own site/app, but the government doesn't get to exclude some people from service just because they don't run JS. Speaking as a techno-elitist, that's techno-elitist BS.

> If you really insist on a JavaScript free world you are of course welcome to visit a government office in person, pick up, and mail back a paper form.

AH-whaaaa? Rather than fallback to plain HTML+CSS you're content to let the user fallback to hard copies and physically transporting their meat-puppet? To save costs? On web development? Where's the sense in that?

> The website is merely a convenience we offer to you.

Well, no. It's an INconvenience you offer me. If you're offering convenience to most people but deliberately excluding some that seems to me to go against the egalitarian spirit of our American government, no? "Unfair"?

> Otherwise you'll need an IE 10 or newer browser, on an Operating System that supports TLS 1.1 (Windows Vista or newer), JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.

I run Dillo. A government website that doesn't look decent and work right when accessed with the Dillo browser is just broken and sad in 2019.

>First, as a person who makes web sites and apps, I believe it's unprofessional to fail to account for users who can't or won't run JS. JS abuse is rampant.

If you do web for a living, you should also know that fallbacks and graceful degradation and server-side rendering all come with a cost. Both monetarily and in terms of complexity.

I would bet that the vast majority of government websites are nothing more than simple forms or informational pages.

Yes, I'll Grant you that if you've designed an interactive, multipage form then it is costly to rebuild it to degrade. However, I'd argue that the form was probably unnecessary technically complex and that starting with having a degraded option in the first place isn't additionally costly (and better protects the agency from ada lawsuits).

In the very rare cases that we're talking about a true webapp (i.e. Google docs, or I'll even Grant you GIS (mapping)visualizations, even if it's possible to degrade those), then yes, decisions need to be made on what minimal technical requirements are required. E.g. a government agency offering an application that only works in chrome would be a non starter.

While I agree with you that most if not all sites should offer some sort of no JavaScript fallback, the development resources required to offer such a thing is just generally unpractical when it's such a small minority of users. Government or not, they still have to choose between spending their limited departmental resources on an extremely small minority, or the greater userbase as a whole.

> the development resources required to offer such a thing is just generally unpractical

Yeah, iSnow made the same point, but it doesn't scan. "Boss, I can make it work w/o JS but it will cost more..." Huh? Doesn't that sound just like what an unprofessional developer would say?

The fact that so many popular JS frameworks don't do the right thing is part of the JS abuse in my opinion (same goes for accessibility.) Lazy developers wrote half-assed frameworks and other lazy developers chose to use them and then people start to believe that adding JS somehow makes it hard or expensive to do without JS when really they are just doing it wrong in the first place.

> when it's such a small minority of users.

The population of the US is just under 330M, so if, say, 0.5% can't or won't run JS to interact with taxpayer-funded government services that's about 1.5M people. Those folks (of whom I am one) should not be disenfranchised, so to speak, because the gov hired unprofessional developers. The government shouldn't do that, and they certainly shouldn't try to tell me that I'm some out-of-date digital neanderthal for caring enough about web insecurity to disable JS, eh? Lousy devs (as demonstrated by the fact that they can't provide a non-JS web experience/fallbacks at an affordable rate) are precisely the ones the JS code of whom I have no wish to run, and I certainly don't want my tax dollars going to pay them to screw me out of access to the service also paid for by my tax dollars.

> choose between spending their limited departmental resources on an extremely small minority, or the greater userbase as a whole.

Or they could use tech that works for everybody automatically for the same cost, eh?

By that same argument, we don't need to worry about accessibility.

Disabled users don't get a choice, that's their lives. People who voluntarily disable a core browser component do. Apples and oranges. You should (and legally need to) worry about accessibility.

When I can't access the page content I read the page source. Disabled users can do the same. There are other workarounds like graphic captcha solvers. There's nothing unsolvable about accessibility, it's just annoying.