This made handling the forms way harder, obviously. In-page scripting to (e.g.) preserve form input properly on a failed submit, or to dynamically handle a date picker, was and remains pretty benign. So we set about creating a terrible example that would convince this guy to let us use best practices.
This meant I needed to write a perl script that created a no-javascript date picker. This date picker included an entry for every possible birthday for a user who might sign up, so it had every date from like 1/1/1930 through 12/31/1990 or whatever we figured was a reasonable boundary at the time.
We published the page and sent him a link, and in about 15 minutes we heard back. "Ok, I get it. Use scripting."
A potentially more horrifying example of programming chicanery came from the same era, when a reasonable solution to a given page problem was that I wrote Perl (using Mason) that wrote Javascript that wrote HTML.
I am not sorry.