The understated power of progressive enhancement

Build for the worst connection in the room and everyone above it gets a better experience for free.

What progressive enhancement actually is

Start with HTML that works without JavaScript. Layer on CSS. Layer on JS last. The order matters because failures cascade in that direction too.

Why it still pays off

• Search engines reward fast, parseable pages.
• Accessibility comes nearly free.
• You ship less broken state to users on bad networks.

A page that works without JavaScript is a page that works during your worst deploy.

What we still write JavaScript for

Interactions the platform doesn’t ship: complex filtering, drag-and-drop, optimistic updates. The platform handles most of the rest now.

Where to start