A cogent definition and spirited defence of progressive enhancement:
Progressive Enhancement is an extension of our shared values on the web and goes to the root of the web. I believe—and hope you agree—that the web is for everybody and should be accessible regardless of the device a user brings to the party.
I bet you’re going to just keep clicking and clicking and clicking…
It was a crazy time in Brighton last week: Reasons To Be Creative followed by Improving Reality followed by dConstruct followed by Maker Faire and Indie Web Camp. After getting some hacking done, I had to duck out of Indie Web Camp before the demos so that I could hop on a plane to Germany for Smashing Conference—the geek party was relocating from Brighton to Freiburg.
I was there to deliver the closing keynote and I had planned to reprise a talk that I had already given once or twice. But then Vitaly opened up proceedings by declaring that the event should be full of stories …and not just stories of success either; stories of failure. Then Elliot opened the show by showing some of his embarrassing early Flash websites. I decided that, in the spirit of Vitaly’s entreaty, I would try something similar. After all, I didn’t have anything quite as embarrassing as Atomic Kitten or Hilary Duff e-cards in my closet.
So I threw away my slidedeck and went Keynote commando. My laptop was connected to the projector but I only used it to bring up a browser to show embarrassing old sites like the first version of adactio.com complete with frames, tables for layout, and gratuitous DHTML animation. But I spent most of the time just talking, telling the story of how I first started making websites back when I used to live in Freiburg, and describing the evolution of The Session—a long-term project that’s given me a lot of perspective on how we often approach our work from too short a timescale.
It was fun. It was nice to be able to ditch the safety net of slides and talk off-the-cuff to a group of fellow geeks in the intimate surroundings of Freiburg’s medieval merchant’s hall.
I finished by encouraging people to look out the window of the merchant’s hall across to the splendid cathedral. The Freiburger Münster is a beautiful, magnificent creation …just like the web. But it’s made of sandstone and so it requires constant upkeep …just like the web. The Münsterbauverein are responsible for repairing and maintaining the building. They can only ever work on small parts at a time, but the overall result—over many generations—is a monument that’s protected for the future.
I hope that when we work on the web, we are also contributing to a magnificent treasure for the future.
If you were at dConstruct last week (lucky you!), you will have heard this music during the breaks. All of these tracks are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence.
Yes, that last one is from my band—a little bit of audio nepotism.
There are only a select, in my opinion, beautifully crafted conferences and dConstruct is definitely one of them.
A report from the BBC on this year’s Brighton Digital Festival including interviews with Honor, Timo, and Seb.
Some lovely pictures from the Clearleft office-warming party last weekend.
