Why progressive enhancement matters more than it looks

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Progressive enhancement is easy to treat as a detail, and that is exactly why it is worth a few minutes of attention.

Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Why this earns attention

Start with markup that works, then layer behaviour on top. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Scripts fail more often than people expect. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

What to watch for

A page that degrades gracefully never fully breaks. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

The short version

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
• 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

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.