Some excellent practical advice on progressive enhancement.
Practice Progressive Enhancement.
Build first and foremost with forgiving technologies, declarative technologies, and forward and backward compatible coding techniques.
All content should be readable without scripting.
If it’s worth building on the web, it’s worth building it robustly, and building it to last.
This is a great history of the idea of progressive enhancement:
It is an idea that has been lasting and enduring for two decades, and will continue.
Put the kettle on; it’s another epic data-driven screed from Alex. The footnotes on this would be a regular post on any other blog (and yes, even the footnotes have footnotes).
This is a spot-on description of the difference between back-end development and front-end development:
Code that runs on the server can be fully costed. Performance and availability of server-side systems are under the control of the provisioning organisation, and latency can be actively managed by developers and DevOps engineers.
Code that runs on the client, by contrast, is running on The Devil’s Computer. Nothing about the experienced latency, client resources, or even available APIs are under the developer’s control.
Client-side web development is perhaps best conceived of as influence-oriented programming. Once code has left the datacenter, all a web developer can do is send thoughts and prayers.
As a result, an unreasonably effective strategy is to send less code. In practice, this means favouring HTML and CSS over JavaScript, as they degrade gracefully and feature higher compression ratios. Declarative forms generate more functional UI per byte sent. These improvements in resilience and reductions in costs are beneficial in compounding ways over a site’s lifetime.
Straightforward smart sensible advice that you can apply to any feature on a website.
Perhaps the tide is finally turning against complex web frameworks.
It’s kind of ridiculous that this functionality doesn’t exist yet.
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.
A little fix for Safari.