Comments on: Progressive Enhancement and Graceful Degradation: Making a Choice

By: ranmeriaz

ranmeriaz — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:03:57 +0000

A frequently overlooked solution is to use an Ajax framework that takes care
of cross-browser compatibility and other low-level details.

This moves the development to a much higher level of abstraction, and can cut down development time quite dramatically.

For example with Bindows (http://www.bindows.net) you get browser compatibility for everything from IE 5.5 to Safari 4, plus Section 508 accessibility support out of the box.

By: Hamran

Hamran — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 23:29:35 +0000

Graceful degradation is obsolete. Hardly anybody ever made it work. Progressive enhancement is exactly the same thing, but just upside-down. They aren’t 2 approaches you choose from or use a mix of both. Progressive enhancement literally replaces graceful degradation to accomplish the same thing.

The reason progressive enhancement works is because of the way Web code is structured: basic HTML plus optional CSS and optional JavaScript. You build the basic version of your site in HTML only, and it should be 100% functional in HTML only. The user can get at all the content, they can enter text in the Search box and click go and see a page of search results, they can do all the things that you need to do on the website. Whatever feature you add, you first add it to the HTML and it has to function there without CSS and JavaScript. I test this by literally removing the CSS and JavaScript files from a website and running it in my browser. It should still work perfectly.

Once you have a perfect HTML-only site, you add CSS and JavaScript in a completely optional way. You don’t use methods unless you test for their existence first. You add event listeners and hijack link clicks with JavaScript. You have the freedom to add a thousand things because they are all optional.

With graceful degradation you are working against the way Web code is structured. You’re thinking of the combination of HTML/CSS/JavaScript as 1 and you’re trying to come up with less-than-1 to work in HTML only. With progressive enhancement, the HTML is 1 and the HTML/CSS/JavaScript is more-than-1.

So I don’t recommend you do both approaches, or even consider any graceful degradation. Build essential HTML and optional CSS and optional JavaScript. Done.

By: AutisticCuckoo

AutisticCuckoo — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:33:22 +0000

I definitely agree that progressive enhancement is preferable to graceful degradation. If you think things through properly before you start, building with progressive enhancement adds very little, if any, extra work. Graceful degradation, on the other hand, is like retrofitting accessibility: difficult, tedious and expensive.

Of course there are certain types of applications that cannot work with nothing but HTTP and HTML support. But most normal sites and applications can.