This is like asking why we should bother having any (new?) HTML or CSS standards at all, when you could write a custom rendering engine in JavaScript for every website.
There is tremendous value in having a solid, usable foundation for web development that doesn't rely on an imperative language to work. To start with, declarative features are semantic and allow for semantic upgrades on wide-scale basis. Do you like your Firefox/Chrome spell-checking in text areas? Do you like them being resizable? Well, this wouldn't be possible if all textareas were some JavaScript hack. (Hey, with only small layer you could actually fake a textarea. Does that seem like a good idea in retrospect, though?)
Also, it would be great to be able to develop simple dynamic web applications (or prototypes) without doing something complex. Progressive enhancement is buried far too early.
If your users are worried about security / performance enough to turn off JavaScript, they probably wouldn't want "HTMLSockets" enabled, either.
I frequently browse with JavaScript blocked by default, and I can tell you right here that this assumption is invalid. There is a world of difference between JavaScript library and a standard, declarative technology. The latter is more likely to be faster, have less bugs, no side-effects and be secure.
There is tremendous value in having a solid, usable foundation for web development that doesn't rely on an imperative language to work. To start with, declarative features are semantic and allow for semantic upgrades on wide-scale basis. Do you like your Firefox/Chrome spell-checking in text areas? Do you like them being resizable? Well, this wouldn't be possible if all textareas were some JavaScript hack. (Hey, with only small layer you could actually fake a textarea. Does that seem like a good idea in retrospect, though?)
Also, it would be great to be able to develop simple dynamic web applications (or prototypes) without doing something complex. Progressive enhancement is buried far too early.
If your users are worried about security / performance enough to turn off JavaScript, they probably wouldn't want "HTMLSockets" enabled, either.
I frequently browse with JavaScript blocked by default, and I can tell you right here that this assumption is invalid. There is a world of difference between JavaScript library and a standard, declarative technology. The latter is more likely to be faster, have less bugs, no side-effects and be secure.