What to ask your agency about progressive enhancement

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on progressive enhancement, these questions are worth asking early.

Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Start with markup that works, then layer behaviour on top. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

A page that degrades gracefully never fully breaks. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

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
• 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

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.