Getting started with progressive enhancement
This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. A short on-ramp to progressive enhancement for teams who have not touched it before.
The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.
What is actually at stake
Start with markup that works, then layer behaviour on top. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Scripts fail more often than people expect
- Change one thing and measure it
A page that degrades gracefully never fully breaks. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.
How to tell if yours is fine
Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. Three things worth confirming about progressive enhancement before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- A page that degrades gracefully never fully breaks — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.