Yeah, see that's what I meant. Cookies are definitely more important (although that's another problem) than JavaScript. The point for disabling JavaScript is that it's the weakest part of all browsers and the most complex one. It's certainly not a "basic" feature. You simply cannot compare cookies and JavaScript as the latter is magnitudes more complex, powerful and dangerous. In a nutshell, one is active whereas the other is passive. People afraid of "cookies" usually don't even know what those are and the fear of them is often ill-founded. JavaScript however is quite a different beast and many experts advise you to enable it for "trusted" sites only.

If you are serious about "cross-platform", you have to expect that people use browsers other than MS IE or Mozilla which may not support JavaScript (properly).

You can't be serious about that. Do you really mean a gray site with absolutely nothing displayed is the best you can do? I guess you mean you don't care about those "few" people which I could comprehend.