Where I work, we spend a lot of time talking about how to make websites that work “everywhere” and work even better in favorable browsing conditions. The term often used to describe this approach is “Progressive Enhancement,” or “PE”—and lately, I’ve noticed it may have an unfair stigma attached.
I sometimes hear concerns from developers that building with PE will hold them back from innovating and “moving the web forward,” because it requires spending a lot of time making things work in old or obscure browsers that aren’t presumed to be common within their audiences.
I find the opposite to be true. For us, building with Progressive Enhancement moves almost all of our development time and costs to newer browsers, not older ones. Perhaps that’s because our approach to PE has evolved beyond a mere separation of concerns to a more controlled test-driven application of technologies—which is a rather abstruse way of saying that we just serve something basic and useful to everyone and then heavily qualify everything we do from there. This means that ancient or under-featured browsers like IE 6 or BlackBerry 5 still have access to the core content and functionality, but newer code doesn’t reach them and potentially break their experience. There are so many new, popular browsers for us to care about nowadays that we rarely have time to test in older/unqualified browsers until the late stages of a project, but when we do, things frequently work as expected—which is to say very simply, and that’s often appropriate anyhow.
The hard part of building with Progressive Enhancement isn’t supporting older browsers, it’s supporting newer browsers. But that’s hard no matter the approach. I suspect that building without PE would actually increase time spent fiddling with older browsers, that is, as long as basic access remains a priority. But in fairness, I can only speak to the approach that works for us. Progressive Enhancement frees us to focus on the costs of building features for modern browsers, without worrying much about leaving anyone out. With a strongly qualified codebase, older browser support comes nearly for free.
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I like change, which means I switch up how I write once in a while. I move furniture first or go for a photo walk. I draw boxes on a whiteboard or type directly into text fields. I think out loud to hear my own voice. I ask questions and listen to other people’s feelings and ideas.
These patterns come from different things around me, like my environment, friends, and how I’ve been feeling. Writing is a personal and subjective practice. As we change, our styles and interests do too. With that in mind, here are three patterns I’ve noticed in myself lately:
So what about you? What kinds of patterns do you find yourself following these days? I’d love to hear about them, whether about writing or anything else.
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If you want to publish a thought on the Pastry Box Project, we have a page that explains how to proceed.
At the Pastry Box, we don't take the question of content preservation lightly. You can read about our philosophy on that matter.
Our content can be accessed in various ways. You can learn about our API and find out how to use a nodejs module to consume in alternative ways the texts published on this website. You will also discover that all our content is archived on GitHub and can be downloaded in a zip format.
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If you want to know more about the Pastry Box Project, you can read our about page, or the genesis (and goals) of the project.
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There are not only pieces of software talking to each other behind this website. There are humans too. The Pastry Box is brought to you by Alex Duloz and it is edited by Katy Watkins.
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