The "refresh causes load" issue can be solved by doing long-polling instead of short-polling.

Note that the http-equiv refresh will only trigger after the page is fully-loaded, which long-polling does not allows to happen, so you do have resilience for the case where the long-poll is interrupted mysteriously.

>Whether websites have to work without any JavaScript at all is a question almost as old as the web itself. By now, the answer is clear: No, they don’t. It’s firmly established that websites should be more than just structured and styled text. JavaScript execution is an integral part of (almost) every browser.

The page this text is on, proves that isn't true!

The trend to CDNs serving static content means that Javascript becomes far more important than before, so "no-javascript" sites are at a huge disadvantage.

For instance, you can load up the same static page for everybody, then after it's loaded, serve some small personalized Javascript that refers to your particular user account which then customizes the page.