Link tags: useragents

Progressive enhancement and accessibility redux - QuirksBlog

This is a really interesting take on the intersection between accessibility and progressive enhancement (which I always felt was there, but this expresses it well):

Accessibility aims to optimize an experience across a spectrum of user capabilities. Progressive enhancement aims to optimize an experience across a spectrum of user agent capabilities.

Indeed, if you broaden the definition of “user agent” to include a user’s physiology, I think the concepts become nearly identical.

User agent as a runtime | Blog | Decade City

Ultimately you can’t control when and how things go wrong but you do have some control over what happens. This is why progressive enhancement exists.

gaia/build/ua-override-prefs.js at master · mozilla-b2g/gaia · GitHub

And this is why user-agent sniffing not a future-friendly technique. A new mobile browser comes along, and it has to spoof a fake UA string to all of these sites.

It’s a Red Queen arms race.