>The only reason it wasn't acceptable to require Javascript many years ago is because each implementation was so different that it was impossible to guarantee cross-compatibility. If you used JS, it would almost certainly mean that you would render your site useless to a significant group of your users.
You couldn't pick two or three or n browsers with 99% marketshare and make sure your website worked in them? I don't believe the browser market has been so fragmented in the last ten years that this was infeasible.
One objection used to be that requiring javascript locked out disabled (particularly blind) users. Has that changed? Does anyone know the state of screen-reading browsers these days?
You couldn't pick two or three or n browsers with 99% marketshare and make sure your website worked in them?
No, you couldn't. Back then, the web was split between two major browsers: IE and Netscape. However, the feature set of what was supported in JS was not only completely different among the two, but also completely different among different minor versions of the two. Things that worked on Netscape 6.x would be broken on 6.(x+1), and work again in 6.(x+2), although with a different calling convention. It was mind-numbingly frustrating, and I don't think it would have been humanly possible to write JS that supported all minor iterations of each browser and maintained any sort of complex functionality.
By contrast, in 2006, I wrote a JS library that worked on IE6, Firefox 1.0+, and some early version of Safari. It has worked ever since, among dozens of versions of those browsers. That's the difference.
(Edit: I'm struggling to remember what version Netscape was around 10 years ago; the version number above might be wrong.)
You couldn't pick two or three or n browsers with 99% marketshare and make sure your website worked in them? I don't believe the browser market has been so fragmented in the last ten years that this was infeasible.
One objection used to be that requiring javascript locked out disabled (particularly blind) users. Has that changed? Does anyone know the state of screen-reading browsers these days?