A webpage doesn’t have to look the same in every browser. In fact, a webpage shouldn’t look the same in every browser, according to former Yahoo developer and JavaScript guru, Nicolas Zakas.
Zakas, who spent five years as the front-end tech lead for the Yahoo homepage, recently spoke at the March BayJax Meetup group about what he calls Progressive Enhancement 2.0 — offering users the best possible experience given the capabilities of their device.
Not the same experience, mind you, but the best possible experience. That means progressively enhancing sites according to the device’s (browser’s) capabilities.
Progressive enhancement is perhaps best summed up by the famous Mitch Hedburg quip, “an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs.” In other words, if you’re building websites well they never break, even if you look at them in Lynx. The site may not look the same in Lynx as it does in, say Chrome, it may not function as smoothly, but the core content is still there and can still serve as a stairway that gets people where they want to go even when the enhanced ease of the escalator is absent.
More practically, progressive enhancement means starting with the least capable devices — an older phone, Lynx running on Windows 95 — and then adding more sophisticated features based on screen size, bandwidth and so on.
Zakas also takes on the common assumption that a web “page” is analogous to the printed page. In fact Zakas argues the web is more like television, which has a similar separation of content and device. In that analogy old browsers are like black and white TVs. No one expects a black and white TV to play HD content, but everyone would be disappointed if you served black and white content to an HD TV. Hence the need for progressive enhancement.
If you’re well versed in the history of the web the beginning of the video may be a bit slow, but stick with it. Also be sure to watch the questions at the end where Zakas addresses how to progressively enhance more application-like web pages.