We were told writing apps with an HTML-first, SSR-first, progressively enhanced mindset, using our preferred language/tech stack of choice, was outdated and bad for users.
That was a lie.
We were told writing apps completely using frontend-y JavaScript would make our lives easier.
That also was a lie.
I agree with pretty much every word of this article.
If we were to follow Jiro’s and his apprentices’ journeys and imagine web development the same way then would we ask of our junior developers to spend the first year of their career only on HTML. No CSS. No JavaScript. No frameworks. Only HTML. Only once HTML has been mastered do we move onto CSS. And only once that has been mastered do we move onto JavaScript.
Oh, how I wish that every team building for the web would use this sensible approach!
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.
This looks interesting. On the hand, it’s yet another proprietary creation by one browser vendor (boo!), but on the other hand it’s a declarative API with no JavaScript required (yay!).
Even if this particular feature doesn’t work out, I hope that this is the start of a trend for declarative access to browser features.
HTML’s new `command` attribute on the `button` element could be a game-changer.
You might want to use `display: contents` …maybe.
Going back to school in Amsterdam.
A defensive enhancement to avoid losing everything you just typed into a textarea.
Kicking the tyres on a declarative Web Share API.