> It can be done but it's brutal and fragile.

Actually many who did jQuery were proud of it.

Some of us made rock solid sites or improved exiting ones quite a bit using a technology known as progressive enhancement.

Let me tell you what is fragile: the cool things I make today that won't even try to work if I disable Javascript. :-)

Edit: and given what we have seen over the last few days now would be a good time to reconsider if every website really needs to be able to run Javascript.