In all honesty, why should I care about you, the tiny minority? Why should I waste any time at all worrying about you?
1. People who are part of a minority by choice. For instance, they choose to use an old computer, old OS, old web browser, etc. even though it is within their means to upgrade. Or they have current software but intentionally restrict it with add-ons like NoScript. You might be justified in not catering to these minorities, because it's just not profitable and you have no moral obligation to do so. Maybe the GP falls in that category; I don't know.
2. People who are in a minority through no choice of their own, and have no power to change their circumstance. One example would be a poor student or job-seeker who's stuck with an old computer and can't do anything about it. People with disabilities also fall in this latter category. I know someone who once lost a job because he is blind and some inaccessible software barred him from doing that job. He described how that felt in this blog post:
http://blindaccessjournal.com/2006/02/torn-from-the-collecti...
All that to say that your comment is quite insensitive. Those are real people in that small minority, and depending on why they're in that minority, we developers might have an obligation to accommodate them.
EDIT: Yes, I know that JavaScript apps can be accessible.
I fully understand making a site accessible for those who need it, but I don't understand the NoScript people.
Also, if you don't have an unlimited Internet plan, not having to download 5MB of trackers, "analytics" scripts and Flash ads can be a pretty significant advantage.
Are you sure about your numbers? How do you know that people with javascript disabled are a minority? Or, more specifically, how do you measure that without requiring javascript?
I'm all for making web applications that need javascript. But let's do it for the right reasons, not because "everybody has javascript installed".
Besides we're all minorities in one way or another. I'm sure I could find some dimension by which you're a minority and you'd be pretty cheesed off if you weren't catered for for some trivial reason.
How about we say it's fine replacing text with images? We could always use alt tags for accessibility. The number of people who ever actually select/copy text from your website will be <1%, so why not just do away with it and get the text in any font we like, with any rendering style & layout we like?
Not to mention that any decent screen reader should surely be decent enough to extract text from an already rendered page (I mean christ, we have testing frameworks that can basically do this already).
If building apps using purely JavaScript breaks screen-readers, we need to fix screen readers. If our applications aren't working for people who insist on browsing with lynx or whatever, well, for shame.
Honestly though, another factor of "JavaScript only" things is that it means that some sort API is exposed to the client, so if it's really such a massive problem, just pull the JSON and parse that into something readable.
The idea that it is actively shameful to use Lynx is strange and antithetical to the way the web was originally designed - the user agent is SUPPOSED to be in control of presentation, the markup is SUPPOSED to be semantic.
I absolutely think there's a place for a text-based browser still, however, one that is designed with modern considerations.
Of course it is, but it's clearly an admitted strawman.
What's wrong with people these days? You can't rhetorically explore someone's views without everyone jumping in and shouting "strawman" as if it's their new favourite word.
A strawman -- which, as you admit, this was -- is very different from "rhetorically exploring someone's views". Its "rhetorically exploring something distinct from the views of your opponent, and using it to impugn the views of your opponent."
Which, you know, makes people upset.
No, it isn't. You are making the mistake of conflating a strawman with an argument built on a strawman as a logical fallacy.
> No, it isn't.
Yes, it is.
> You are making the mistake of conflating a strawman with an argument built on a strawman as a logical fallacy.
No, I'm not. If you are exploring their views rather than yourself constructing something new and distinct from their views, you aren't making a strawman, whether or not you also, implicitly or explicitly, are arguing against their position using whatever you are exploring, which would be the strawman fallacy in the case where you were constructing a strawman.
No, it really can't. Using something meaningfully distinct to "explore" their views is the exact same logical fallacy as using something meaningfully distinct to "argue against" their views. What you are dealing with is something distinctly different than their views, whether you are "arguing against" it or merely "exploring" it.
And, even if it could, it still wouldn't be equivalent to exploring their views, so being called out for using a strawman when using a strawman -- for whatever purpose -- woudl still not be being called out for using a strawman whenever you rhetorically explore someone's views.