Progressive Enhancement For a Faster Site
This is a cross post from the Wayfair Engineering Blog Progressive Enhancement is often described as an alternate approach to “Graceful Degradation” – it encourages focusing on the most basic functionality first and then building out from there. It also forms the core of the Yahoo! Graded Browser Support model, which we use as a guide for our own rules around browser support. This is an important topic, but it has been covered fairly extensively in other articles , so I’m not going to dive into it too much here. Instead I am going to talk about specific progressive enhancement techniques we use at Wayfair to improve site performance. As you may know, there are some amazing new features in HTML5/CSS3 that make web development easier – rounded corners, drop shadows, gradients, placeholders in text fields, in browser form validation, etc., all of which reduce dependency on background images and JavaScript. These are great features to have, but what about your IE 6