Progressive Enhancement and/or Graceful Degradation

Progressive Enhancement

It is the idea of organizing feature development so that "(...) [web application] SHOULD look better in different browser" (21:25), in an attempt to create "The best possible experience given the device capabilities" by leveraging Native APIs, because otherwise we’re "trying to make older browsers do things they were never meant to do is the reason [that web development] takes too long" (26:55)

Graceful Degradation

In Web Development, this would be the equivalent of Defensive programming, where we would tell at least an error message if a required dependency is missing.

Escalators are a good example of graceful degradation — when they break down, they become steps.

Is Progressive Enhancement Dead Yet?

The Basic Layout ... Is NOT a BROKEN Layout

This is the main point of Progressive Enhancement, is to organize web site and application code to add enhancements.

The main point is to support what's native to browsers, let CSS do what it's good at, and let JavaScript do things it's good at.

Heydon (the author of that video) makes good points about how, in 2020, we should re-think how we build web applications. How we can now detect and load code paths only when applicable.

Since I'm publishing this file in the desire to have a long-term storage of my ideas, I will maybe find a way to quote and attribute properly here.

If it's many years past 2020 (crazy year that was!), if you saw a funny video that mentioned Tony Hawk and a shark with a fez talking about Progressive Enghancement, that's the video I wanted you to see!

You can see more very insightful videos from The videos are hosted on vimeo, but published from https://briefs.video/ and I can't unfortunately do anything more than link to his video talk "Is Progressive Enhancement Dead Yet?"

The author is Heydon Pickering (Yes, to see his site, you’ll ave to turn off JavaScript — what a cool idea!).

Progressive Enhancement 2.0

Quotes:

Reference