Should you care about users that disable JavaScript or plug-ins?

The other day, someone had put up a site on reddit.com’s web_design subreddit and asked everyone to give their opinion of it. One of the first comments I read said that the site fell apart if the visitor had JavaScript turned off. My first reaction was, “So what?” and this got me wondering, if someone turns off JavaScript and the site doesn’t function for them the way you intended it to, is that your problem or is it theirs? Should you, as the developer, spend the extra time making the site still look good for the few people that don’t run JavaScript? Or by turning it off, do they have to accept the fact that web sites aren’t going to look right every time?

As a web surfer, the only thing I block is pop-ups. I don’t block ads, I run every plug-in out there. Why? Because I want to get the full experience of the Internet and those things are all apart of it. And it wasn’t until recently that I began wondering about people that block JavaScript, mainly because as jQuery becomes more and more prevalant on the sites I build, sites with jQuery image slideshows or something similar. But the things I’ve built are pretty easy to fix with a bit of CSS, I just set up the div that that images are in to the height and width of one image and the set the div to overflow:none so it will only show the first image if the visitor has JS turned off. But I think that’s as far as I’m willing to go, I do that because it also helps the site display correctly if the visitor uses a a browser that runs JavaScript slowly.

What about plug-ins, like Flash Player and Silverlight? If the user has those disabled, should you have something in it’s place? Or just something saying they need to install Flash if they wish to view it? My opinion on this is pretty much the same as with JavaScript, if you choose to turn it off, that’s your problem and you’re the one who’s missing out. If the swf is essential to the site, then I’m sure the developers chose Flash for a reason and to use the site, you’ll need to enable Flash. Otherwise, it’s just something to add to the design and you can get by without it. I don’t think that front-end developers usually have the time to add alternative content for people that are blocking or disabling plug-ins.

And this is something that’s going to become an even bigger deal in a year or so. We’ve seen how long it’s taken to kill Internet Explorer 6 and the main problem it causes and going to be nothing compared to what IE7 and IE8 are going to do with HTML5. They don’t support any of it from what I understand and some developers moving to using the canvas tag in order to support the iPhone and iPad, some people are going to have to choose, build for the majority of web surfers (unfortunately true) or people that use browsers that support HTML5. Or are people going to spend the time building multiple versions of the same thing, which usually won’t have the same functionality. And I know the clients I work with won’t go for that!

My view is there users choose to turn this functionality off and if they do, then they should be prepared to view a lesser version of most sites. You can’t complain about your TV resolution if you don’t subscribe to the HD channels or if you don’t have an HD TV.