Reinventing links detracts from the UX. You can't hover over the link and see where the link goes. Modifier keys often aren't respected meaning you can't open a link in a new window/tab with just one click. Fake links also break things like screen readers.
Reinventing the text widget means you're invariably going to miss something. Maybe you'll miss a "power user" feature like keyboard navigation. Maybe you'll miss something esoteric like rendering Chinese characters or find on the page. Maybe you'll break a rarely used feature like scrolling. Maybe you'll just display random characters.
To me it seems like a large part of the pain of requiring javascript is less about breaking nojs and more that devs are using javascript to poorly/partially reimplement key browser features. I'm reminded of the "Just normal web things" post the other day.
Reinventing links detracts from the UX. You can't hover over the link and see where the link goes. Modifier keys often aren't respected meaning you can't open a link in a new window/tab with just one click. Fake links also break things like screen readers.
Reinventing the text widget means you're invariably going to miss something. Maybe you'll miss a "power user" feature like keyboard navigation. Maybe you'll miss something esoteric like rendering Chinese characters or find on the page. Maybe you'll break a rarely used feature like scrolling. Maybe you'll just display random characters.
To me it seems like a large part of the pain of requiring javascript is less about breaking nojs and more that devs are using javascript to poorly/partially reimplement key browser features. I'm reminded of the "Just normal web things" post the other day.