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This is a fantastic distillation of how bitter the PWA discussion often seems to be. I had no idea that “progressive” should be understood as “progressive enhan
by tobr 6y ago
This is a fantastic distillation of how bitter the PWA discussion often seems to be. I had no idea that “progressive” should be understood as “progressive enhancement” (graceful degradation) rather than “technological progress”.
Looks like the term was coined in [1], which describes the idea of something that starts as a website, but progresses to become app-like as technology and the user’s wishes allow. By that definition it’s your PWA not planning on supporting Firefox.
1: https://infrequently.org/2015/06/progressive-apps-escaping-tabs-without-losing-our-soul/ https://infrequently.org/2015/06/progressive-apps-escaping-t...
- appleflaxen 6y agoyour last sentence is hard to understand. i think there is a typo or an extra word somewhere.
- samb1729 6y agoIt would have been helpful to have quoted the sentence you did not understand as I cannot be sure that I now see the same thing you did. However, in case we are seeing the same thing I’ll reword the following sentence for you: > By that definition it’s your PWA not planning on supporting Firefox. The above could also be written: > Under the assumption that a PWA is defined as a website which queries the browser to discover additional functionality, and then goes on to use features it discovers, it is the PWA which doesn’t support a particular browser. Specifically, the PWA likely depends on functionality which may not always be present, which means it it not progressively enhanced. Apologies if my rewording comes across condescending. I have no information about your level of knowledge on the subject and chose not to omit anything on purpose.
- appleflaxen 6y agothat clarifies it; sorry for the lack of detail
- zdragnar 6y agoI have heard the term progressive enhancement used much earlier than that- probably by at least 5 years. In ye olden days, people used it to mean that websites should be able to work without javascript at all, and not overly rely on new CSS features. At the time we were making websites for customers that cared about IE6 support. The notion of a "web app" was a dream that most people would have considered a nightmare, given how inconsistently everything was implemented at the time.
- e12e 6y agoWikipedia claims it was coined as recently as 2003: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement#Hist... Sounds fairly recent to me (so long after first versions of CSS and js) - but also not entirely unreasonable. 2015 is certainly much too recent.
- tobr 6y agoThe point is that Progressive web app takes it’s first word from Progressive enhancement. For that to be possible the chronology must be that PE predates PWA. The terms are not synonymous.