Signs it is time to revisit progressive enhancement

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. A few signals that progressive enhancement is due some attention.

Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• Start with markup that works, then layer behaviour on top
• Scripts fail more often than people expect

How we handle it

A page that degrades gracefully never fully breaks. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

What this looks like day to day

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
• 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

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