Link tags: fragility

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Progressively Enhanced Builds - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

Rather than thinking, “how do I combine a bunch of disparate content, templates, and tooling into a functioning website?”, you might think “how do I start at a functioning website with content and then use templates and build tooling to enhance it?”

I think Jim is onto something here. The more dependencies you have in your build process, the likelier it is that over time one of them will become a single point of failure. A progressive enhancement approach to build tools means you’d still be able to launch your site (even if it’s not in its ideal state).

I want to be able to view, edit, and if need be ship a website, even if the build process fails. In essence, if the build does fail I can still take all the source files, put them on a server, and the website remains functional (however crude).

Is JavaScript more fragile? – Baldur Bjarnason

Progressive enhancement’s core value proposition, for me, is that HTML and CSS have features that are powerful in their own right. Using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript together makes for more reliable products than just using Javascript alone in a single-page-app.

This philosophy doesn’t apply to every website out there, but it sure as hell applies to a lot of them.