Three myths about progressive enhancement

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. A few things about progressive enhancement that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

“It only matters for big sites”

Start with markup that works, then layer behaviour on top. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

“Our platform handles it”

A page that degrades gracefully never fully breaks. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

The short version

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
• Start with markup that works, then layer behaviour on top — 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.