Before you invest in progressive enhancement

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. Before you spend anything on progressive enhancement, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Start with markup that works, then layer behaviour on top
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

The mistakes we see most

Scripts fail more often than people expect. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

A page that degrades gracefully never fully breaks. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

What this looks like day to day

The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. Three things worth confirming about progressive enhancement before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Scripts fail more often than people expect — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.