Progressive enhancement: what to get right first

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. If you only fix one thing about progressive enhancement this quarter, make it the first item below.

The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Start here

Start with markup that works, then layer behaviour on top. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Then this

Scripts fail more often than people expect. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Eventually

A page that degrades gracefully never fully breaks. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

In practice

Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. 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

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.