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Comment by toni | Hacker News Reader

I think the premise of the OP is not so much "Your site should work perfectly without Javascript because I'm an arrogant prick" but more in the lines of "Earn my respect and don't treat me like an idiot, and I will gladly whitelist your site and will use it with Javascript enabled".

If I understand it correctly, OP was redirected to a dumb-down instruction page of how to enable Javascript in his browser. What he actually wants is the reason "why" he must enable Javascript for the site.

You can win over noscript population very easily by taking a little bit of time and explaining your app with some amazing screenshots.

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Don't get me wrong: I don't disagree with the sentiment, I'm just saying I doubt I'd even put in the effort of redirecting them to a separate page of any kind if I'd decided that my landing pages should be very javascript heavy.

My prejudiced view is that it's such a small part of the population it's not worth caring about, though I'd be glad to be proven wrong.

If doing pages that require javascript to even run in the first place is a good idea, I think is a different discussion.

  <noscript>To enjoy all this awesomesauce, please enable javascript:
  <img src="/annotated_representative_screenshot_you_should_already_have_for_the_tutorial_page.png" />
  </noscript>

Wave some CSS at it to center it nicely; done.

"My prejudiced view is that it's such a small part of the population it's not worth caring about, though I'd be glad to be proven wrong."

It also depends greatly on the kind of web app you are making. If your audience is highly tech-savvy then caring about noscript population will increase your userbase.

I'll gladly concede the point. It was actually more people running noscript than I thought, and for some markets (I'd also wager tech-savy ones) it might very well be a sizable chunk of users.

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