#progressive enhancement

Your app should work in a read-only mode without JavaScript. 

Per usual, Jeremy distills things down to simple and unobjectionable points. So many of the arguments against progressive enhancement seem to follow the the thinking from when we collectively believed that sites should look the exact same in every browser.

Progressive enhancement isn’t either/or. It’s a helpful spectrum where the more functionality that can be accessible without JavaScript the better, but just because it may not be pragmatic to have everything accessible without JavaScript all the time, there’s plenty of ways to ensure information can still be accessible without massive engineering efforts.

I haven’t shared anything about the inner workings of my recent site update, and I’m not planning on it. However, supporting a “Site Fidelity” option inspired by Jim Nielsen is one of the little things I’m more excited about. 

It’s a sort of hybrid “progressive enhancement” demo meets “a perpetual option for CSS Naked” that provides both a handy feature for some visitors and a constant reminder to always keep things as simple and semantic as possible.

Some interesting and fun exploration here by Robin. The Details element is one I haven’t built for with my site update, but there’s certainly some good opportunities to use this more in the future.