I worry that more and more nowadays, people jump to JavaScript frameworks because that is what they know or have been taught, even though they are entirely inappropriate for a wide array of things and can often produce poor results.
Last week I wrote about the great work that Matthew did and now he’s written up his process:
The important thing is to have a resilient base layer of HTML and CSS, and then to enhance that with JavaScript.
The goal isn’t to write less code.
It’s to ship less code to users. Better code. Faster code. More resilient code.
THIS!
Sooooo many front-end developers don’t grasp this fundamental principle: it’s not about you!
Progressive enhancement is a design and development principle where we build in layers which automatically turn themselves on based on the browser’s capabilities.
The idea of progressive enhancement is that everyone gets the perfect experience for them, rather than a pre-determined “perfect” experience from a design and development team.
Needless to say, I agree with this sentiment.
I’ve worked with a lot of browser technology over the years. Service workers are pretty mind-blowing.
Photoshop in the browser? That needs JS.
But the reality is, most of what we build is either static HTML or mostly just forms and page reloads. We can build the web that way by default, and progressively enhance a more Ajaxy experience on top of it.
The result is an app that’s faster to load, faster to run, and less prone to breaking… without much additional work for your developers.
There’s a cost to using dependencies. New versions are released, APIs change, and it takes time and effort to make sure your own code remains compatible with them. And the cost accumulates over time.
This post is about more than web components:
If we want our work to be accessible in five or ten or even 20 years, we need to use the web with no layers in between. For all its warts, the web has become the most resilient, portable, future-proof computing platform we’ve ever created — at least, if we build with that in mind.
If the JavaScript API requires a user gesture, maybe it’s time for a new button type.
A defensive enhancement to avoid losing everything you just typed into a textarea.
It’s not because it’s declarative—it’s because it’s robust.
Hey! Been tryin’ to meet you.
Brittleness is the opposite of resilience. But they both share something in common.