I feel necessary to point out that the sites you regularly visit seem to fall in two broad categories. Wikipedia, Slashdot and so on are enormous sites with vas

I feel necessary to point out that the sites you regularly visit seem to fall in two broad categories. Wikipedia, Slashdot and so on are enormous sites with vast user bases and advanced JS, where any JavaScript functionality has to be backed up with plain old HTML or the site becomes unusable for a significant number of people. University websites are in my experience much smaller sites with a very strong emphasis on factual content and almost no JavaScript at all in the first place. The problematic sites are going to be the middle ground - large-ish sites with reasonably competent web developers who have higher priorities than supporting the 1% of users who have JavaScript disabled.