Tim Almond

JP Stacey has written an interesting little piece on “progressive enhancement” as opposed to “graceful degradation”:-

Before, if I saw a dropdown on the designs without a submit button or some such, I’d think, well, the HTML won’t have a submit button either, so I need to build the Javascript at the same time and get it all to work at once. This led me into all sorts of tangles—each one on its own easy to extricate myself from—and at the end of it I would have a form that would work or look right without every layer of technology in place.

This also, I think applies in the world of HTML and CSS. As a developer, I’ve been guilty of building HTML pages with lots of layout-based thinking in there (such as lots of named divs instead of using basic HTML tags).

Using proper tags means that if a page is used in a degraded form, the styling will still be present, albeit crude (eg. the <b> tag).

Sometimes, of course, you want more variety, and DIVs can do this, but maybe that’s more about defining logical content blocks, rather than thinking in terms of styling.

Tags: Software Development, Internet //