I think the real issue here is a lack of graceful degradation on the Camper website. Built the right way, their fancy paper.js presentation thing would source whatever content it needs from within the page itself. The only excuse is laziness coupled with an unhealthy infatuation with new shiny technologies. I guess there are some bored people behind this who think anything, even a shoe catalogue, can be revolutionised. And that's fine, but they forgot about the core fundamentals of the web -- the kind I can rely on when loading up lynx and firing off a GET request to see some ... content.
Probably not. It is often the case that a site is built entirely (read meaningfully) in JS. If one wanted to degrade gracefully without JS, one would have to have two sites: JS and Plain-Old-HTML. Now this is not possible, especially for a startup. You have a set number of resources. DRY helps allocate them. If you violate DRY with 2 sites, you're focus is going to be lost.
Now some might say that good web design was violated by make the site dependant on JS. However, as the title shows, this is 2012. My cellphone has the ability to render most JS effectively. The old adage about degrading JS is just that, old. It was in a day before ECMA Script was sanctioned or common on the browsers. It was before jQuery and the like unified the browsers.
tl;dr: JS is ubiquitous and is what the front end, and even the whole app is built on.
using a text browser at all feels quite pointless these days, as much as I like them. Even programming website (case in point stack overflow) just don't work at all without javascript and images.
Recent versions of Links support Javascript, so that was helping. However, I've been on Stackoverflow with javascript turned off (noscript) and it is one of the few sites that still renders usable.
