Pragmatic Progressive Enhancement

Last week I went to AKQA in London to give a brown-bag presentation on progressive enhancement. I took this chance to vent some of my ideas on the subject and counteract some of the criticisms I heard about the need for enhancing web solutions progressively.

I’ve come up with the following “Seven rules of progressive enhancement”:

1. Separate as much as possible
2. Build on things that work
3. Generate dependent markup
4. Test for everything before you apply it
5. Explore the environment
6. Load on demand
7. Modularize code

Instead of explaining them here, I’ve used a longer train ride to write up an article on the subject explaining the details of all the “rules” and examples of why and how to use them: Pragmatic Progressive Enhancement.

The article is licensed with creative commons, so you are very much invited to use and remix it to your needs.

I will upload my slides together with a video of the presentation once I got the material and checked if the video quality is good enough for publication.

Tags: accessibility, bestpractice, development, methodology, pragmatism, progressive enhancement, webdevtrick

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 at 10:35 am and is filed under accessibility, bestpractice, development, methodology, pragmatism, progressive enhancement, webdevtrick. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.