Hey now
Progressive enhancement is at the heart of everything I do on the web. It’s the bedrock of my speaking and writing too. Whether I’m writing about JavaScript, Ajax, HTML, or service workers, it’s always through the lens of progressive enhancement. Sometimes I explicitly bang the drum, like with Resilient Web Design. Other times I don’t mention it by name at all, and instead talk only about its benefits.
I sometimes get asked to name some examples of sites that still offer their core functionality even when JavaScript fails. I usually mention Amazon.com, although that has other issues. But quite often I find that a lot of the examples I might mention are dismissed as not being “web apps” (whatever that means).
The pushback I get usually takes the form of “Well, that approach is fine for websites, but it wouldn’t work something like Gmail.”
It’s always Gmail. Which is odd. Because if you really wanted to flummox me with a product or service that defies progressive enhancement, I’d have a hard time with something like, say, a game (although it would be pretty cool to build a text adventure that’s progressively enhanced into a first-person shooter). But an email client? That would work.
Identify core functionality.
Read emails. Write emails.
Make that functionality available using the simplest possible technology.
HTML for showing a list of emails, HTML for displaying the contents of the HTML, HTML for the form you write the response in.
Enhance!
Now add all the enhancements that improve the experience—keyboard shortcuts; Ajax instead of full-page refreshes; local storage, all that stuff.
Can you build something that works just like Gmail without using any JavaScript? No. But that’s not what progressive enhancement is about. It’s about providing the core functionality (reading and writing emails) with the simplest possible technology (HTML) and then enhancing using more powerful technologies (like JavaScript).
Progressive enhancement isn’t about making a choice between using simpler more robust technologies or using more advanced features; it’s about using simpler more robust technologies and then using more advanced features. Have your cake and eat it.
Fortunately I no longer need to run this thought experiment to imagine what it would be like if something like Gmail were built with a progressive enhancement approach. That’s what HEY is.
Sam Stephenson describes the approach they took:
HEY’s UI is 100% HTML over the wire. We render plain-old HTML pages on the server and send them to your browser encoded as text/html. No JSON APIs, no GraphQL, no React—just form submissions and links.
If you think that sounds like the web of 25 years ago, you’re right! Except the HEY front-end stack progressively enhances the “classic web” to work like the “2020 web,” with all the fidelity you’d expect from a well-built SPA.
See? It’s not either resilient or modern—it’s resilient and modern. Have your cake and eat it.
And yet this supremely sensible approach is not considered “modern” web development:
The architecture astronauts who, for the past decade, have been selling us on the necessity of React, Redux, and megabytes of JS, cannot comprehend the possibility of building an email app in 2020 with server-rendered HTML.
HEY isn’t perfect by any means—they’ve got a lot of work to do on their accessibility. But it’s good to have a nice short answer to the question “But what about something like Gmail?”
It reminds me of responsive web design:
When Ethan Marcotte demonstrated the power of responsive design, it was met with resistance. “Sure, a responsive design might work for a simple personal site but there’s no way it could scale to a large complex project.”
Then the Boston Globe launched its responsive site. Microsoft made their homepage responsive. The floodgates opened again.
It’s a similar story today. “Sure, progressive enhancement might work for a simple personal site, but there’s no way it could scale to a large complex project.”
The floodgates are ready to open. We just need you to create the poster child for resilient web design.
It looks like HEY might be that poster child.
I have to wonder if its coincidence or connected that this is a service that’s also tackling ethical issues like tracking? Their focus is very much on people above technology. They’ve taken a human-centric approach to their product and a human-centric approach to web development …because ultimately, that’s what progressive enhancement is.