Chapter 1

Progressive Enhancement. This chapter is all about this concept.

Progressive Enhancement is a philosophy aimed at crafting experiences that serve your users by giving them access to content with technological restrictions. For awhile the concept of 'Graceful degradation' was the way the industry operated. Everyone wanted to build the greatest and latest browser experience, but this didn't always work out well for the user. So over time, people began to see 'Graceful Degradation' as undermining both the content and accessibility. The book used the analogy of 'graceful degradation' becoming like a ride at the amusement park, where you must be a certain height to ride or have these features in your browser, otherwise you wouldn't be able to really access the application.

Fault tolerance is introduced ... which is a systems ability to continue to operate when it encounters an unexpected error.

I liked the analogy that ultimately the idea of Progressive Enhancement is about excellent customer service. That doesn't mean each user is going to have the same experience, but it asks you to honor the content and your users by applying technologies in an intelligent way, layer upon layer, to craft an amazing experience.

The levels of the experience will stack upon each other. The author looks at 5 levels, which build upon each other to create an experience that grows richer with each step. These are simply identifiable steps on the path to the most basic experience to the exceptional one.

The point of this chapter is to keep progressive enhancement in mind. It is the center of everything and incredibly important. Ultimately it is the reason we are here, the reason, front-end exists, and that is to give the user the best possible, fully functioning, working experience in the browser.