Is graceful degradation in the absence of JavaScript still useful?

Question

When even mobile browsers have JavaScript, is it really necessary to consider potential script-free users?

Answer 1

I'm actually in an interesting position when it comes to graceful degradation of JS. I'm working on a web application that bots and crawlers have absolutely no business looking into. There's nothing they can gleam that should be indexed.

The informational site accompanying the web application, however, should be indexed, and therefore JS degrades gracefully there.

In the web application, if you don't have JavaScript enabled, you're probably not supposed to be there. It's intended to be a rich interactive experience. The web application actually requires JS to be enabled, and for you not to be sitting behind a corporate firewall.

We're not serving anything malicious, its just our intent and purpose for the web application that's different. The goals of our web application and those of our informational site are completely different.