&gt; makes sense to do<p>Do you use the pointer that fopen(3) returns without checking for NULL? Progressive enhancement is mainly error checking and handing failures gracefully.<p>&gt; not willing to turn it off when the site doesn&#x27;t work without JS<p>Why are you willing to make your business look shoddy and unprofessional? Running without javascript has always been an option, and always will be. Anyone that doesn&#x27;t run the javascript obviously isn&#x27;t expecting fancy features, but you should still show any text&#x2F;images (or a basic form if that is relevant), probably along a suggestion that turning on javascript will probably improve their experience.<p>&gt; changes necessary to have this progressive enhancement<p>That&#x27;s the point - this shouldn&#x27;t cost a lot, unless your tools are unusually braindead. Rails made progressive enhancement almost entirely transparent a long time ago. I believe there are several prerender-the-first-load plugins for several popular frameworks. If your tools aren&#x27;t doing this for you (either automagically or otherwise), then those tools are missing important features.<p>&gt; work culture changes<p>It is probably a good idea to pay any technical debt sooner, instead of tying even more projects to bad tools.<p>&gt; users who use NoScript<p>NoScript users are <i>NOT</i>[1] the only group that will see your pages without Javascript. You don&#x27;t control the client, which will always be unreliable.<p>Also, progressive enhancement isn&#x27;t a boolean value; you should be checking for the availability of any feature you use. This may result in only partial support, which is probably better than <i>no</i> support (or a javascript error) if someone loads your page in an old browser or something unusual. The web is inherently a fluid environment, which makes defensive programming even more important.<p>&gt; direct financial sense<p>What is the direct financial impact of showing people a broken website? Do you even analyze the server logs to find out how many people are impacted?<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kryogenix.org&#x2F;code&#x2F;browser&#x2F;everyonehasjs.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kryogenix.org&#x2F;code&#x2F;browser&#x2F;everyonehasjs.html</a>