Nobody's saying you should. But designing things in a progressive-enhancement-type way will mean that you have no need to worry about all these "minorities" as most things will generally more or less work.
Besides we're all minorities in one way or another. I'm sure I could find some dimension by which you're a minority and you'd be pretty cheesed off if you weren't catered for for some trivial reason.
You'd be fine if half the web didn't work for you?
How about we say it's fine replacing text with images? We could always use alt tags for accessibility. The number of people who ever actually select/copy text from your website will be <1%, so why not just do away with it and get the text in any font we like, with any rendering style & layout we like?
Because that is an utterly ridiculous strawman. Using images for text is firstly almost entirely pointless, and has many many drawbacks that using JavaScript doesn't. For instance, it's a pain in the arse to maintain, it breaks text reflowing, it's huge, you have to deal with image compression, and it likely ruins the ability of search engines to spider your content without OCR.
Not to mention that any decent screen reader should surely be decent enough to extract text from an already rendered page (I mean christ, we have testing frameworks that can basically do this already).
If building apps using purely JavaScript breaks screen-readers, we need to fix screen readers. If our applications aren't working for people who insist on browsing with lynx or whatever, well, for shame.
Honestly though, another factor of "JavaScript only" things is that it means that some sort API is exposed to the client, so if it's really such a massive problem, just pull the JSON and parse that into something readable.
Not as ridiculous as you think - a large amount of content is locked into PDFs which present effectively as images, and HTML wasn't always as dominant as it is today.
The idea that it is actively shameful to use Lynx is strange and antithetical to the way the web was originally designed - the user agent is SUPPOSED to be in control of presentation, the markup is SUPPOSED to be semantic.
It's not that it's shameful to use Lynx. I love Lynx. However, the web is continuously evolving, and things like Lynx are not keeping up - I mean, does it support WebGL and HTML5 video?
I absolutely think there's a place for a text-based browser still, however, one that is designed with modern considerations.
I would argue it's fairly similar to using javascript to load documents. If you have a web-app, I'm a huge fan of javascript/client-side rendering. If you've got a blog, not so much.
Of course it is, but it's clearly an admitted strawman.
What's wrong with people these days? You can't rhetorically explore someone's views without everyone jumping in and shouting "strawman" as if it's their new favourite word.
> What's wrong with people these days? You can't rhetorically explore someone's views without everyone jumping in and shouting "strawman" as if it's their new favourite word.
A strawman -- which, as you admit, this was -- is very different from "rhetorically exploring someone's views". Its "rhetorically exploring something distinct from the views of your opponent, and using it to impugn the views of your opponent."
> > A strawman [...] is very different from "rhetorically exploring someone's views"
> No, it isn't.
Yes, it is.
> You are making the mistake of conflating a strawman with an argument built on a strawman as a logical fallacy.
No, I'm not. If you are exploring their views rather than yourself constructing something new and distinct from their views, you aren't making a strawman, whether or not you also, implicitly or explicitly, are arguing against their position using whatever you are exploring, which would be the strawman fallacy in the case where you were constructing a strawman.
A strawman can be used to explore their views. That is the point. It is only a fallacy if you create a strawman, then argue against it and claim to have argued against the original point. That has nothing to do with anything that occurred in your conversation.
No, it really can't. Using something meaningfully distinct to "explore" their views is the exact same logical fallacy as using something meaningfully distinct to "argue against" their views. What you are dealing with is something distinctly different than their views, whether you are "arguing against" it or merely "exploring" it.
And, even if it could, it still wouldn't be equivalent to exploring their views, so being called out for using a strawman when using a strawman -- for whatever purpose -- woudl still not be being called out for using a strawman whenever you rhetorically explore someone's views.
Besides we're all minorities in one way or another. I'm sure I could find some dimension by which you're a minority and you'd be pretty cheesed off if you weren't catered for for some trivial reason.