The Principle of Progressive Enhancement
You don’t want to leave any of your website’s visitors out in the cold, but certain features require up-to-date browsers or plugins. The principle of graceful degradation has been with us for a while now, but that only ensures that you don’t deliver a broken experience for your users that can’t see the advanced functionality. Progressive enhancement starts with a core experience that’s compatible with even the most basic browsers, and then extends that with better functionality for user agents that support it. It sort of turns graceful degradation on its head, but both strategies help balance the competing concerns that come with building innovative websites.
From: Progressive Enhancement at Smashing Magazine
posted by Dan Nordquist on April 24th, 2009 at 9:48 am Permanent link to this post
2 Responses to “The Principle of Progressive Enhancement”
Would you say that “progressive enhancement” and “graceful degradation” are the same thing?
They’re two opposite strategies: with graceful degradation, you’re making considerations so that older browsers (or text browsers, or users without plugins) can still access your content, or something like it. With progressive enhancement, you start with all that base functionality and enhance it for browsers that support more and more advanced functionality.
They are both ways to consider all your content and then all the users that might visit. GD goes front-to-back, and PE goes back-to-front.