Well, as far as my understanding goes, with Progressive Enhancement, you’re basically focusing on the content when you’re designing your site. Simple enough.
Actually, that’s quite brilliant. When I first learned any form of html, css, etc., I designed everything depending on the browser I was using which, back then, was IE, which isn’t even a browser if you ask me. IE just needs to be shot. Just get rid of it.
Okay, ranting done. I really like the article I found from A List Apart. He basically described the whole “enhancement” as a Peanut M&M. Not going to go into details, you can just read the article, but in simplest terms, progressive enhancement is just layers upon layers upon layers of protecting your content from incompatible browsers.
So you can still design your site how you like it and not worry about browsers messing it up. Just make sure you protect it with some Javascript.
Yeah, I like this. Very smart.
July 28, 2010
Katie
2 responses to “Progressive Enhancement”
endurefort
July 29th, 2010 at 08:47
I also liked the List Apart article, it was well written and gave a nice history of how Progressive Enhancement counters the established top-down approach to coding. The M&M analogy helped too, but I was surprised at how superficial it makes the “behavior” side of scripting (ie:javascript) appear. If you look at that picture, the content and the styling provide all of the substance, while the JavaScript merely provides a thin and vulnerable outer shell. I’ve always put more emphasis on the content and CSS side of our client scripting courses, but I’ve never regarded JS in such a lowly position as the graphic suggests.
I’m also at odds with that graphic because I prefer the whole chocolate M&Ms to the peanut kind. So where’s my content now? Is it the chocolate? And what’s the shell now? (head explodes)
takegir
July 29th, 2010 at 09:29
That was a good article but the idea that I had no clue what so ever when I read it. So I scrolled through quite a bit till I was able to find out more. Then I came to a comparison and when i came back to that article. It was really well thought out and put together.