Progressive enhancement is a design and development principle where we build in layers which automatically turn themselves on based on the browser’s capabilities.
The idea of progressive enhancement is that everyone gets the perfect experience for them, rather than a pre-determined “perfect” experience from a design and development team.
We’re all tired of: write some code, come back to it in six months, try to make it do more, and find the whole project is broken until you upgrade everything.
Progressive enhancement allows you to do the opposite: write some code, come back to it in six months, and it’s doing more than the day you wrote it!
I’d like to suggest that everybody in web dev point their dysfunctional novelty seeking (of which I suffer as well) in the direction of HTML and CSS. See how much can be done without JavaScript. It’s a lot! Then look at writing more lightweight JavaScript that’s layered on top of the HTML as enhancements. Because it’s an enhancement and not required for functionality, you can cut the line higher and use newer tech without worry.
See how refreshing that feels.
I also think the number of situations in which an SPA architecture can be recommended is dwindling, chiefly due to how good the web platform has become (and how much better it’s getting every day). And because so much of the rest of the ‘struggle stack’ (transpilers, unique dialects, etc.) was built to get around gaps in the web platform that no longer exist, the use cases for these tools is dwindling in tandem.
This is good news: not only can we avoid piling up transient knowledge about a seemingly endless stream of dependencies, we can also eject from the routine stress of those dependencies changing or breaking under our feet and throwing wrenches into our workflows — all while delivering more robust and performant websites to end users.
After admiring the loveliness of the homepage for Enhance, try reloading it with JavaScript switched off.
Spot the difference? Me neither.
Styling a list of nested details elements to create a beautiful lokking tree view, all in CSS, all nicely accessible.
Here’s Clearleft’s approach to browser support. You can use it too (it’s CC-licensed).
A performance boost in Chrome.
If a browser feature can be used as a progressive enhancement, you don’t have to wait for all browsers to support it.
The `details` element is like the TL;DR of markup.
Baldur Bjarnason has written my mind.