A LIST Apart: For People Who Make Websites

No. 269

Discuss: Understanding Progressive Enhancement

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31 Where is Flash in this example?

I’ve been a proponent of PE for a while, and have gotten push back from developers who want to create for the ‘latest and greatest’ and then look to fix any quirks later. One of they key areas of this battle has been Flash.

I see Flash as being the printed “m” on the M&M – it usually requires some JavaScript to work optimally, or at least there is very seldom Flash without JavaScript involved. Just curious as to other thoughts about this – in the example presented, would Flash be the printed “m” or a second candy shell?

posted at 06:39 pm on October 18, 2008 by Marty DeAngelo

32 Wonderfully clear explanation...

Thank you for the wonderful article. I had no real understanding of the difference that progressive enhancement intends to bring to the table until I read this article. This article clearly portrays the advancements offered by such a development paradigm, and quickly offers up an understanding of it’s fundamental differences.

Thanks again,
Alex

posted at 05:04 pm on October 22, 2008 by Alex Stanford

33 The M

The article does miss explaining the ‘M’ printed on the candy. To me, this would represent the site’s favicon.

I’m a fan of progressive enhancement as I use NoScript on Firefox and hate it when a site forces me to allow their JavaScript just to use the site’s functionality, even though it’s not needed. Sometimes I’ll leave the site, but other ones I really need to use, so have to allow it.

posted at 08:46 pm on October 23, 2008 by Kendall Conrad

34 Both

I just don’t see the difference between progressive enhancement and graceful degradation. To me it seems like progressive enhancement is just graceful degradation done right.

Can anyone please tell me which of the two the following scenario adheres to?

Someone builds a Javascript image gallery that loads all images, and hides the non selected images using Javascript+css. Anchors are used by Javascript to display the selected image and hide the previous selected image. The default action of the anchors are suppressed by Javascript.

If Javascript is disabled, the images are not hidden and all appear in the page. The anchors “href” is set to target the image, so when a certain anchor is clicked, the browser jumps to the appropriate image on the page.

Graceful degradation or progressive enhancement?

posted at 03:02 am on October 30, 2008 by John K

35 Thanks!

That was a quality article. And a good kick in the pants. Often when I go about CSS, even though I’m conscious to make it accessible and test it in older browsers, I focus on CSS being design – and I focus on design and plug the content in after. But really, the content does need to be first. Adding CSS while focusing on the content is a subtle but important shift in thinking. Thanks for the thoughts…

posted at 02:58 pm on November 12, 2008 by Jeff Vdovjak

36 This is really good

In the past i was styling my H’s nad A’s and P’s way before I put some content in the page. After that i started adding some content and then style it, then add some more content, and so on…

After I read your article it all clicked for me – I knew where I wanted to go with the development of my HTML pages.

Now I put in all of my content, then I apply styles to it. It was remarkable to notice how much LESS ie-workarounds I had to apply to my code by doing so. Sometimes I even don’t have to apply any. (those are the times when I’m grinning like a madman).

A great read! All three articles. Thank, you

posted at 03:22 pm on November 14, 2008 by Pavel Kuts

37 Re: Real world Examples?

“http://www.panic.com/coda/ – A great example of progressive enhancement.”

Yikes, I don’t think so:

<a href=”[removed]ScrollArrow(‘right’,‘toolbar’,‘scroller’,‘new-pane’);”>

It amazes me that folks still mark up their pages this way. No self-respecting GD/PE website would replace real hyperlinks with inline JavaScript in the markup. Instead, the HTML link should (re)load the page with the next chunk of content, and a linked JavaScript file would override that hyperlink with the ScrollArrow() behavior.

posted at 02:38 am on June 28, 2009 by Paul Novitski

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