“Graceful Degradation & Progressive Enhancement are two sides of the same coin.” A perfectly worded statement by Tommy Olsson. Graceful Degradation is the older term of the two. A lot of programmers out there are so contempt to make the most beautiful graphical webpage. It’s sad to say that those people wasted most of their time in which they should have been spending it on making the page accessible rather than “pertty”. It’s been said countless of time to just keep it sweet and simple. Don’t over work yourself it’ll be fine :] . Although it is good to have something amazing looking but your main focus should be on the mainstream of users. Priority first my friend! Have your site “degraded” for those with noob specs as it will bring in more users.
A good Progressive Enhancement would be having your site being about to be displayed in multiple devices. Ex: Your site is being read on a tablet Galaxy, but also being access by another user using a iPhone App. Having accessibility on both devices are vital as both are very popular. It’s like when Apple didn’t have Flash on their iTouches and iPhones. They were crippling their users by not being able to access most site which forced their users to go with other products which could use Flash. Don’t be stubborn! Grow up and give what your users want because it is absolutely not about what you want. Don’t worry though your extra work will be well worth it :] .
Sources:
http://kokowaraionzu.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/graceful-degradation/
http://scottbw.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/adventures-in-progressive-enhancement/
http://accessites.org/site/2007/02/graceful-degradation-progressive-enhancement/
My Web Page: http://xijinz.webs.com/Main.html
Hey, thanks for the pingback.
You got it spot on with the “keep it focused on the majority”. Many of my test machines are pre-2005 and many modern Web sites struggle on them. Especially hilarious is our Mac OS 9 test box on which pretty much the entire Web, with the exception of Google, is unusable.
Nothing says you can’t have flashy graphics, HTML5, Flash, and oodles of JS. Web devs just need to bear in mind the little guy with the older computer. lite.facebook.com was a good example of an attempt until they took it down. >:[
Good article
Chris