Futuristic Progressive Enhancement – Jim Nielsen’s Blog
May 22, 2024
Imagine someone came to you in a time machine and said, “In the future we will write software that becomes more capable as time passes without any effort on our part.”Wouldn’t that be amazing? Surely you’d want to know what sorcery makes this possible, right?
Well the future is here. You can do that now. It’s called progressive enhancement.
Source: Futuristic Progressive Enhancement – Jim Nielsen’s Blog
In the early early 2000’s we called it ‘graceful degradation’. Which captured a philosophy that you should build for the most capable browsers, but fall back to lesser solutions for less capable browsers.
The term, and philosophy ‘progressive enhancement’ emerged a little later, but well over 20 years ago now. On the surface it appears very similar, but there is a subtle difference.
Here we build for a baseline, and enhance an app or experience.
As Jim Nielsen observes here, it’s like a kind of magic, where software gets more capable over time, as the enhancements become more commonplace.
