Progressive enhancement brings everyone in

As designers and developers began building on the web, they brought the spirit of graceful degradation with them. Browsers were advancing at a rapid clip, and early web designers wanted to make use of that; give their visitors something that felt modern and sleek. But there was a wide gap between what each browser could do. To try and account for that, web designers turned to graceful degradation, creating a baseline experience for modern browsers, that still attempted to render at least something when those web technologies weren’t available on older or different browsers.

Source: Progressive enhancement brings everyone in – The History of the Web