Progressive enhancement has become a bit of a hot topic recently, most recently with Tom Dale conclusively showing it to be a futile act, but only by misrepresenting what progressive enhancement is and what its benefits are.
Let's look at the real-world benefit of progressive enhancement.
Did you know that this works in every browser?
<image src="f1.jpg">The Chrome team are often asked to show the process of debugging a performance issue, including how to select tools and interpret results. Well, I was recently hit by an issue that required a bit of digging, here's what I did:
I like using diagrams as a way of showing information flow or browser behaviour, but large diagrams can be daunting at first glance. When I gave talks about the Application Cache and rendering performance I started with a blank screen and made the diagrams appear to draw themselves bit by bit as I described the process. Here's how it's done:
About 5 years ago it felt like the progressive enhancement battle had been won, but after watching the reactions to Nicholas Zakas' "Enough with the JavaScript already" it seems all the old arguments are back with reinforcements. Well, I'm wearing my angry-pants and I'm ready for a jog down ranty lane.
I've been promising myself I'd start a blog for about 100 years now, but it's finally here! I decided to build everything from scratch to force myself to learn Vagrant, Puppet and other general sysops stuff that was on my "to explore" list. This was dumb in terms of how long it took me to get everything up & running, but I have no regrets.
Hello, I’m Jake and that is my face. I’m a developer advocate for Google Chrome.
Feel free to throw me an email, unless you're a recruiter, in which case destroy every email-capable device you own to prevent this possibility.
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