Issue 40  October 26th 2016

Progressive Enhancement isn't Dead, but it Smells Funny

In this blog post, Nolan Lawson discusses what progressive enhancement means in 2016.

From the article: "The next billion people who are poised to come online will be using the internet almost exclusively through smartphones. And if Google’s plans with Android One are any indication, then we have a fairly good idea of what kind of devices the “next billion” will be using:

• They’ll mostly be running Android.
• They’ll have decent specs (1GB RAM, quad-core processors).
• They’ll have an evergreen browser and WebView (Android 5+).

What they won’t have, however, is a reliable internet connection. In a world where your lowest common denominator is a very capable browser with a modern JavaScript engine, running on a smartphone that would have been classified as desktop-class ten years ago, but the network is now the bottleneck, what does that mean for progressive enhancement?"

Nolan's article discusses how we can think about progressive enhancement in terms of network reliability versus the technology we are using to build web applications and sites.

nolanlawson.com  

Web development has two flavors of graceful degradation

Laurie Voss (the co-founder of npm, inc) wrote a response to Nolan Lawson's article re: progressive enhancement. He breaks down progressive enhancement into two categories: web applications and web sites.

For web applications built on JavaScript, progressive enhancement doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, if the user doesn't have JavaScript enabled, there is not much a web application can do to function without it. On the other hand, if you're building a web site consisting of many different pages (a news site, a business, an entertainment site, etc), building a JavaScript-less experience is a great idea and useful for users who don't have an ideal setup while browsing the web.

seldo.com  

Progressive Enhancement Techniques with React

This article gives an explanation of how to create a form with React, Redux, React Router and server side rendering. The form that is rendered in the browser is a regular form, so when JavaScript is disabled, the form will be submitted to the server, and the server can use the data to dispatch an action accordingly. When JavaScript is enabled, we want to dispatch the action directly from the browser. There are two other posts in this blog series that discuss more complicated forms with progressive enhancement and data fetching and the github repo is available as well.

medium.com  

Progressive Web Apps -- Part 3 & 4

Part 3 and 4 by Addy Osmani give tips and tricks on how to create progressive web applications with React.

Part 3: A good progressive web app loads instantly regardless of network state and puts up its own UI on the screen without requiring a network round trip (i.e when it’s offline). We can achieve this by using service workers. A service worker is a background worker that acts as a programmable proxy, allowing us to control what happens on a request-by-request basis. We can use it to make (parts of, or even entire) React apps work offline.

Part 4: Progressive enhancement is not about making the web work for users without JavaScript turned on, nor SEO, but about making it resilient to lie-fi and spotty network connectivity blocking users from getting a meaningful experience. When it comes to progressive enhancement with JavaScript libraries and frameworks, server-side rendering is a useful tool in your arsenal.

medium.com