JavaScript polyfills to support new baseline HTML/CSS features are a necessity for sustainable future-and-past-proof development in the modern Web ecosystem

JavaScript polyfills to support new baseline HTML/CSS features are a necessity for sustainable future-and-past-proof development in the modern Web ecosystem. They're very important, but your site should still be usable without them. Turning off JavaScript everywhere because you don't like experimentation and want to pretend the world froze in your golden years is narrow-minded and bullheaded. More like the other way round: abandoning best practices so that you can play with a shiny new framework is what is bullheaded. If you want to play, do it on a side project or in your spare time. Don't do it in production code unless you can truly justify it. Every public facing site that I write works reliably in IE8 without JS. From that base line the experience only gets better until it's every bit as good as the site that abandons IE or no-script agents. Now, guess whose site is search engine friendly from the outset; guess whose is more user friendly because it more closely aligns to expected browser behaviour; guess whose has a lower load time because the server can deliver a pre-rendered HTML page to the browser; guess which one doesn't just die because ad-block was installed?