Future-oriented full web design: Incremental Enhancements

Original: Understanding Progressive enhancement
Author: Aaron Gustafson
Translation: http://lifesinger.org/

Since 1994, the Web development community has sounded the drumbeat of graceful demotion (graceful degradation). The concept comes from the engineering world, whose core idea is to give the newest and most powerful browser a full package of experience, leaving some leftovers basic functionality for those unfortunate people who are still using Netscape 4. There is no doubt that this has played a role. But it does not fit the original vision of the Universal Accessibility Network (universally Accessible Web) by Tim Berners-lee, the father of the Web.

About 10 years later, some smart guys began questioning the graceful downgrade, and found that it was deficient on many levels. They focus on content availability (availability), overall accessibility (overall accessibility), and mobile device browsers, looking for a new way to web development--This approach focuses on content, And not just the support of old equipment. But there is no real action on the lips.

In the SXSW conference in 2003, Steve Champeon and Nick Finck a speech called "a full web design for the Future", in a conference on film, Music and interaction. In this way, they reveal the blueprint for this new approach to web development. Steve gave it a name: Progressive enhancement (progressive enhancement).

There's a (subtle) difference here.

If you're scratching your head and trying to figure out the difference between graceful demotion and progressive enhancement, I'm telling you, this is a question of perspective. Graceful demotion and progressive enhancement all consider how well a Web page works in various browsers on a variety of devices. The key to the difference is the focus of their respective attention and the impact of this attention on the workflow.

A view of graceful demotion

Graceful demotion focuses on building Web sites in the most advanced/versatile browsers. Testing in browsers that are considered "old" or in an inadequate capacity often waits until the last part of the development cycle, and is typically limited to the previous release of mainstream browsers such as IE, Mozzila, and so on.

In this mode, the old browser can only provide a passable (poor, but passable) experience. There may be some minor patches to adapt to a particular browser, but these browsers are not the focus of attention, in addition to correcting major errors, it will not cost much of God.

Perspective of progressive enhancement

Progressive enhancement focuses on content. Please note the difference: I didn't even mention the browser.

Content is why we originally created the site. Some websites propagate content, some collect content, some request content, some operation content, some website above all function have, however they all need content. That is the key to incremental growth as a more appropriate model. This is also why Yahoo! quickly adopted this pattern and created a hierarchical browser support (graded Browser Support) strategy.