graceful degradation : is it degrading?

[Aaron Watters]

Graceful degradation is what I hope to display
as I continue to age...

But in the context of web programming it also
refers to the supposedly desirable behaviour
of web sites to "do something reasonable"
as resources are denied them by
client browsers such as cookies, applets,
javascript, etcetera.

So for example if the browser has javascript
turned off pages should somehow "still work".

These days javascript is so
pervasive that graceful degradation is becoming
increasingly difficult and absolutely no fun for
web designers and programmers.

Question: is graceful degradation for no-javascript
feasible and desirable these days?

For example after I announced my WHIFF treeview
widgets

   http://aaron.oirt.rutgers.edu/myapp/docs/W1100_2200.TreeView

people noted that they sometimes didn't work properly with
javascript off.  I could fix this in some cases, but
the fix would involve changing a "POST" to a "GET"
and that would cause MSIE to suddenly fail when the
GET parameters get too big (and probably other
browsers too).  So it really would only fix part of the
problem.   Consequently I'm tempted to say: "sorry,
please enable javascript if you want to use this page..."

What is the state of best-practices and such?
   -- Aaron Watters

===
she was dirty, flirty / musta been about thirty...
   Stones '60s
she was shifty, nifty / musta been about fifty...
   Stones '90s
     (what rhymes with 80?)