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Many believe we should leave the term “progressive enhancement” behind and start anew, but why not educate developers, clients and stakeholders and change many of the misconceptions surrounding it? Changing the name won’t change anything unless we address the real fundamental problems we have when describing the underlying concepts.
A superb illustration of why playing the numbers game and dismissing even a small percentage of your potential audience could be disastrous.
It’s not 1% of people who always can’t see your site and 99% of people who always can. It’s 1% of visits. Almost all the people who don’t get your site correctly actually should have been able to. They don’t have JavaScript turned off. They’re not browsing on a WAP phone over a 2g connection from a shanty town. They’re you, in a cellar bar or a hotel room or waiting for the phone network to wake back up.
This is the way to approach building for the web:
I want to make as few of those assumptions as possible. Because every assumption I make introduces fragility. Every assumption introduces another way that my site can break.
It’s progressive enhancement, but like Stuart, Tim is no longer planning to use that term.
Stuart writes up his thoughts on progressive enhancement following the great discussions at Edge Conf:
So I’m not going to be talking about progressive enhancement any more. I’m going to be talking about availability. About reach. About my web apps being for everyone even when the universe tries to stop it.
Another great in-depth round-up of the third and final Responsive Day Out, this time from Katja Durrani.
It’s rare for me to visit a conference and come away thinking that everyone gave a great presentation. This was that conference. Nice one.
This is a deep, deep dive into responsive images and I can only follow about half of it, but there are some really useful suggestions in here (I particularly like the ideas for swapping out images for print).
Dividing the world in two.
An in-depth look at where web components stand today, together with some very good questions about where they might be heading tomorrow.
A new handy little performance testing tool from the W3C along the lines of Page Speed Insights.
You’ll want to back this—you’ll want to back the hell out of this!
Handy tips for creating, optimising, and using SVG on the web, be it in CSS or HTML.
The full text of Aaron’s magnificent closing keynote from Responsive Day Out.
A great round-up of Responsive Day Out 3:
The conference only lasted one day but came packed with the insane number of 12 speakers in total. There was only one speaker track, so you got to see all of them during the day — no hard choices to make. It was highly compressed, almost overwhelming knowledge hammering into my brain, in a density that I had rarely experienced before. It was awesome!
We should write for ourselves, we should write about whatever we want to. Not just about the web either. Our twitter feeds don’t need to be a highlight reel of our best moments and not every blog post needs to be a stinging critique of the latest javascript framework. They just need to reflect who we are and what we think about and with any luck, when we look back on them, we might learn something about ourselves.
This one-day workshop that Cennydd is running in London on July 22nd looks like it’s going to be really good.
Just over 48 hours since the third and final Responsive Day Out finished, and all of the audio is available! Here’s the podcast feed.
That Drew is something else.
If you were at Responsive Day Out on Friday and you liked the music that was playing during the breaks, here’s the track listing. Creative Commons licensed.
A fantastically-detailed write up of the whole day out. Each talk is described, and then the threads are tied together at the end. Great stuff!
As may have become clear from my notes above, Responsive Day Out 3 was a day full of variety. I had the feeling it could have easily been called Web Day Out, and I guess that makes sense, as responsive web design has naturally grown to be a pleonasm in the past few years.
Orde liveblogged every single talk from Responsive Day Out 3!
I really like the way that Paul’s talk builds on top of ideas laid down by Ethan and Frank. Good stuff.
When you’re out celebrating at the end of Responsive Day Out and realise it’s just a few minutes to midnight and you haven’t published your 100 words yet.
Know any talented recent graduates? Let ‘em know about this 3-month internship at Clearleft.
I really like this approach that Remy is taking: write some code to one thing, and just one thing. I much prefer my JavaScript to be small pieces loosely joined rather than monolithic.
More of this kind of thing, please!
It seems grossly unfair to refer to this as an article. It’s a short book. It’s a very good short book; lucid and entertaining in equal measure. A very enjoyable read.
It is, unfortunately, surrounded by some distracting “enhancements” but perhaps you can use your cleaner-upper software of choice to route around their damage: Instapaper, Pocket, Readability, whatever works for you.
I really like this impassioned love letter to the web. This resonates:
The web is a worthy monument for society. It cannot be taken away by apps in the app store or link bait on Facebook, but it can be lost if we don’t continue to steward this creation of ours. The web is a garden that needs constant tending to thrive. And in the true fashion of the world wide web, this is no task for one person or entity. It will require vigilance and work from us all.
I really like Alex’s framing of best-of-breed progressively enhanced websites as “progressive apps” (although Bruce has some other ideas about the naming).
It’s a shame that the add-to-homescreen part isn’t standardised yet though.
The many benefits of an analogue detox. There’s neuroscience and everything.
It’s so important that we take the time to connect and switch on.
If you’re not sure if Indie Web Camp is for you, have a read of Charlotte’s take on it:
The reason I didn’t attend last time is because I didn’t know if I had enough experience to spend a weekend working on something completely new. Turns out it doesn’t matter how much coding experience you have. I know I won’t be the only new person at Indie Web Camp. The idea is that we figure out solutions together.
I think there’s a lot of truth to this. By any objective measurement, PHP is clearly inferior to just about every other programming language out there …but its preinstalled out-of-the-box nature means it’s the path of least resistance.
I’d like to do this for all Clearleft web projects.
How important is mobile for @nytimes? We’re blocking access to our home page on desktop in our building.
The first in a series of articles about the architecture of the internet and its security issues, this is a great history lesson of how our network came to be.
What began as an online community for a few dozen researchers now is accessible to an estimated 3 billion people. That’s roughly the population of the entire planet in the early 1960s, when talk began of building a revolutionary new computer network.
An up-to-date round-up of the various techniques available when you want to provide a fallback for SVG.
A comparison of when to use percentages and when to use vw/vh in your CSS.
I had a lot of fun recording this episode with Andrew and Jeffrey. It is occasionally surreal.
Stick around for the sizzling hot discussion of advertising at the end in which we compare and contrast Mad Men and Triumph Of The Will.
A deceptively simple but powerful use of flexbox.
This sounds like it could be a very useful tool to introduce early in projects to get a shared understanding of progressive enhancement.
Using Progressive Enhancement makes your site better for all users and enables the 275 million users of Opera Mini worldwide.
Oh, what a spray! What a lovely spray!