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The following rant is somewhat tangential but, as a front-end developer that takes pride in progressively enhancing websites I work on, I think this is a shame

by philbo 13y ago

The following rant is somewhat tangential but, as a front-end developer that takes pride in progressively enhancing websites I work on, I think this is a shame for a different reason. So many times when speaking to employers/product owners about progressive enhancement of JavaScript components, the answer I get back is along the lines of "we don't care about that" or "we don't have the time". Sometimes in conversations with other developers too. I think this change will contribute to an increase in that attitude. Progressively enhancing a website enables you to still deliver a whizz-bang, fancy-pants UI but ensure that it degrades to a sane text document when viewed in, say, lynx [1]. And it doesn't mean doubling the development time of every feature, which I often hear cited as an argument against. Often it can involve providing a very cut-down equivalent that takes relatively little time to build. Should we care about people that turn off JavaScript or use a non-JavaScript browser enough to write code for them? Given that the web is an open, standards-based platform, I think we should. [1] http://lynx.browser.org/ http://lynx.browser.org/

pacifika 13y ago
Shouldn't progressive enhancement be part of best practices, rather than a billable feature on the invoice? Or in other words, used by default.
- philbo 13y ago
  Absolutely! But I still find myself having to make the case for it, when others are looking for ways to cut corners.
mikeratcliffe 13y ago
Which is exactly why we added the disable JS button to Firefox developer tools options. It simply disables it for the current tab until the tab is closed.
Isofarro 13y ago
> So many times when speaking to employers/product owners about progressive enhancement of JavaScript components, the answer I get back is along the lines of "we don't care about that" or "we don't have the time" Stop talking. Start doing instead. Employers and product owners are hiring you for your skills, so use them. Don't ask permission to follow best practice, just do. You are more than a code monkey. Do your employers really not care if a third party outside of their control decide to do something to affect the availability of their site? Do your employers control, audit and manage every single byte that gets delivered as part of their website? For those they don't completely and accurately manage and control, how do they absolutely ensure that every byte that needs to be delivered arrives correctly and is interpreted correctly in their users browser? How do they remove the risk of all those server hops between their web server and the customer's browser? How do they control that? The Web cannot be controlled or managed in this way. There are simply too many factors outside of a website owners control that affect how their site is perceived by customers. Without pragmatic approaches it's either an all-or-completely-broken situation, or when a site is built properly with progressive enhancement, a slight degradation of usability that customers don't really notice - because the core experience just works. https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/making-software/progressive-enhancement.html https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/making-software/progressiv... Want a good data point? How about a couple that decided rather vocally that progressive enhancement is dead. $100,000 spent on a bootstrapped application, and then this astonishing comment: http://unicornfree.com/2013/why-we-shut-down-charm-on-the-eve-of-public-launch-at-48kyear-and-growing#comment-1248 http://unicornfree.com/2013/why-we-shut-down-charm-on-the-ev... -- read the third paragraph of that comment. Sometimes, it's an expensive lesson to learn.

by philbo 13y ago

pacifika 13y ago

Shouldn't progressive enhancement be part of best practices, rather than a billable feature on the invoice? Or in other words, used by default.

philbo 13y ago
Absolutely! But I still find myself having to make the case for it, when others are looking for ways to cut corners.

mikeratcliffe 13y ago

Which is exactly why we added the disable JS button to Firefox developer tools options. It simply disables it for the current tab until the tab is closed.

Isofarro 13y ago

> So many times when speaking to employers/product owners about progressive enhancement of JavaScript components, the answer I get back is along the lines of "we don't care about that" or "we don't have the time" Stop talking. Start doing instead. Employers and product owners are hiring you for your skills, so use them. Don't ask permission to follow best practice, just do. You are more than a code monkey. Do your employers really not care if a third party outside of their control decide to do something to affect the availability of their site? Do your employers control, audit and manage every single byte that gets delivered as part of their website? For those they don't completely and accurately manage and control, how do they absolutely ensure that every byte that needs to be delivered arrives correctly and is interpreted correctly in their users browser? How do they remove the risk of all those server hops between their web server and the customer's browser? How do they control that? The Web cannot be controlled or managed in this way. There are simply too many factors outside of a website owners control that affect how their site is perceived by customers. Without pragmatic approaches it's either an all-or-completely-broken situation, or when a site is built properly with progressive enhancement, a slight degradation of usability that customers don't really notice - because the core experience just works. https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/making-software/progressive-enhancement.html https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/making-software/progressiv... Want a good data point? How about a couple that decided rather vocally that progressive enhancement is dead. $100,000 spent on a bootstrapped application, and then this astonishing comment: http://unicornfree.com/2013/why-we-shut-down-charm-on-the-eve-of-public-launch-at-48kyear-and-growing#comment-1248 http://unicornfree.com/2013/why-we-shut-down-charm-on-the-ev... -- read the third paragraph of that comment. Sometimes, it's an expensive lesson to learn.