I was thinking of the slashdot 'classic mode', which doesn't use javascript and was retained by slashdot (after a huge outcry from the community) when they re-engineered the site using modern web tech a few years ago. But I guess the amount of work needed to provide something like that here is just plain prohibitive, so fair enough, it's unlikely to happen.
To try to find a halfway house I looked into which text mode browsers support javascript, and found some people have successfully used elinks with spidermonkey on linux. Sadly the freebsd spidermonkey port seems to have lapsed. I downloaded the spidermonkey code from mozilla yesterday and tried to build it but got the usual millions of errors, and I don't have the spare bandwidth to debug it. I also found something called edbrowser
[URL]http://edbrowse.org/[/URL] which looks quite intriguing, they say it has an embedded javascript engine, I haven't had time to try it out yet. I do really like the links browser (the original one from twibright.com) running with graphics enabled and I use that sometimes on linux boxes in a framebuffer console, its very useful when you're in the test cell and don't have a laptop with you; but of course that doesn't support javascript. Anyway I'll keep looking, I'll try to get round to trying edbrowser some time.