What is Progressive Enhancement?

What is Progressive Enhancement?

"Jeff mentioned the concept of 'Progressive Enhancement' when talking about using JQuery to write stackoverflow.

After a quick Google, I found a couple of high-level discussions about it.

Can anyone recommend a good place to start as a programmer.

Specifically, I have been writing web apps in PHP and would like to use YUI to improve the pages I am writing, but a lot of them seem very JavaScript based, with most of the donkey work being done using JavaScript. To me, that seems a bit overkill, since viewing the site without Javascript will probably break most of it.

Anyone have some good places to start using this idea, I don't really care about the language.

Ideally, I would like to see how you start creating the static HTML first, and then adding the YUI (or whatever Ajax framework) to it so that you get the benefits of a richer client?"

Asked by: Guest | Views: 217

Total answers/comments: 4

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Guest [Entry]

See also Unobtrusive JavaScript which is the bedrock progressive enhancement is built.

Guest [Entry]

See also Unobtrusive JavaScript which is the bedrock progressive enhancement is built.

Guest [Entry]

I wrote a tutorial on creating a poll that used progressive enhancement at NETTUTS. The idea is to create a functional site using XHTML/CSS and PHP, and then intercept forms etc with JavaScript. (I used jQuery).

Guest [Entry]

"Going at it from the other direction is sometimes referred to as graceful degradation. This is usually needed when the site is built first with the enhanced functionality afforded by the various technologies then modified to degrade gracefully for browsers with those technologies are not available.

It is also graceful degradation when designing to work with older browsers (ancient in the Internets terminology) such as IE 5.5, Netscape, etc...

In my opinion it is much more work to gracefully degrade the application. Progressively enhancing it tends to be much more efficient; however, sometimes the need to take an existing app and make it accessible in these lacking environments arise."