Progressive enhancement patterns
This is in the works! Would you like to help flesh it out? Let's do it!
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Silent failure
See the Pen HTML cheatsheet 1 / display types by perpetual.education (@perpetual-education) on CodePen.
Some newer things will not work in all browsers, but are a solid fallback – and maybe we can just set them and have that be a progressive enhancement.
Key
concept
Progressive enhancement
A design approach where features are introduced incrementally, using capability checks and safe fallbacks so that enhanced experiences never become dependencies.
Progressive enhancement starts from the baseline and adds upgrades
WikipediaIn our case, we’re saying “If you have this special tool – use it. If not, that’s OK. It’s just an enhancement if available.” The site will still work great for everyone, but some people might get a little extra.
Key
concept
Graceful degradation
A design approach in which an experience is built for full capability, while ensuring that reduced capabilities result in a simpler but still usable and correct experience rather than failure.
Graceful degradation starts from the ideal and accept that some environments will get a worse but usable result.
WikipediaIn our case, this would mean designing for the most capable browsers first, then being comfortable with older or limited browsers rendering a less refined version of the experience (not because we added special fallbacks), but because the platform naturally ignores features it doesn’t support. The experience degrades but we’re saying we’re OK with widows on browsers that don’t support it (and especially because we expect them to sooner than later).
So, which is it?
Is it progressive enhancement? Or graceful degradation?
Derek think’s in this case (text-wrap: pretty;) , it’s both. But the point here is to just start thinking about the ideas. Keep going – and maybe you can help us more clearly define them.