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Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

tomdale.net

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Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#91

Post by npsimons »

glesica wrote: post #6

"And most importantly: Don’t be ashamed to build 100% JavaScript applications. You may get some incensed priests vituperating you in their blogs. But there will be an army of users (like me) who will fall in love with using your app." This statement needs a huge, HUGE caveat that you should only be building 100% JavaScript apps in situations where doing so makes sense . For example, I find the new Blogger "web app" i…

Exactly; those of us "vituperating priests" who rail against JavaScript abuse are mostly complaining about things like plain text (or even text plus photos) requiring JavaScript. You want to create some whiz bang new thing that needs Turing completeness? Go to town with JavaScript. You want to require enabling a possible malware vector and chew through computer resources like they're candy just to read a few paragraphs of text? Forget you, I'll keep browsing. And so will crawlers, so you'll never get linked. Attention is scarce, information is not - do the math.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#92

Post by trafficlight »

kleiba wrote: post #74

There are dinosaurs like me who use the web mostly for reading stuff on websites. I also happen to use an old, quite slow computer as my default machine. It aggrevates me when a site that I try to open because of its textual content takes 30 seconds to render since there's too much Javascript going on. Then I'm typically sitting there thinking: "how hard can it be to display a piece of text?" Because of this, when I…

In all honesty, why should I care about you, the tiny minority? Why should I waste any time at all worrying about you?

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#93

Post by ris »

d0m wrote: post #52
mynameisme wrote: post #9

There's no reasons sites like tumblr shouldn't work without javascript. Period. And while there are some things on the web that are genuine applications (trello, dashboards, etc.), the vast majority of things are content driven, which should never require js.

You claim facts without explaining your reasoning.. Let me put it this way using your own vocabulary: There's no reasons sites like tumblr *should work without javascript*. Period. Why why!

I rather think the onus is on people like you to come up with a reason that they _shouldn't_.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#94

Post by dictum »

leokun wrote: post #5

The websites as applications is correct. I see grumblings from some old time grumpy folk about why does this site need JavaScript. Because it's a runtime now. The web has evolved, and aren't you glad it did because flash is dying.

I'm not glad Flash is dying. If we're considering requiring JS for static pages, we didn't learn anything from the horrors of Flash's heyday. Most of the time when I'm browsing the web—does "browsing the web" sound too 1995?—I want a request to return hypertext. A text file with hyperlinks, sections, titles, embedded pictures, forms. I don't want any computation done, I don't want a runtime, I want a trillion linked augmented text files.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#95

Post by dandelany »

camus wrote: post #68
sergiotapia wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who cares about people using NoScript, no one should. They are in the vast minority, not worth the trouble accommodating for them.

A minority that is growing quite fast , people are not stupid prepare for the javascript backlash like Flash hate wave. If your content is not worth it , if i need javascript just to read some text , if you dont explain why i should turn javascript on with a noscript tag ,then you'll lose me and many more as an audience.

Do you have any statistics to back up your assertion that it's growing? From what I've seen from my own anecdotal experience, as well as from access logs from past places I've worked, this minority is vanishingly small (Regardless, there is no right or wrong answer in general, there is only the right or wrong answer for your particular website/market. If a significant number of the users you want to support have JS disabled, then by all means, build a site that runs without JS. But it's a cost-benefit analysis. For most sites I've worked on, the cost of lost business due to users without JS is (massively) dwarfed by the added development cost of building a full-featured app that doesn't require JS. If that means I lose you as a customer, I'm not losing sleep over it.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#96

Post by tomjen3 »

camus wrote: post #68
sergiotapia wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who cares about people using NoScript, no one should. They are in the vast minority, not worth the trouble accommodating for them.

A minority that is growing quite fast , people are not stupid prepare for the javascript backlash like Flash hate wave. If your content is not worth it , if i need javascript just to read some text , if you dont explain why i should turn javascript on with a noscript tag ,then you'll lose me and many more as an audience.

No we will not lose many more. The percentages who actually did something about flash very minuscule and we would lose more by not supporting IE6.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#97

Post by ris »

sergiotapia wrote: post #48
rwmj wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And people using NoScript.

And who cares about people using NoScript, no one should. They are in the vast minority, not worth the trouble accommodating for them.

And who cares about people using Mozilla, no one should. They are in the vast minority, not worth the trouble accommodating for them. IE all the way.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#98

Post by graue »

jenius wrote: post #81
ebiester wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, check out bustle.com -- I used to agree with you, but that's really fast for both the first load and subsequent loads.

Idn, I'm not impressed with the initial load time. If that site was served as a static page that was recompiled when a new article was added, it would be significantly faster. But at the same time, subsequent loads would probably be a little slower. Which one is more worth it?

You can do both! Prerender the front page server side, then switch to super-fast PJAX once the JavaScript is loaded. This nifty technique is called... wait for it... "progressive enhancement".

Airbnb's recently released Rendr library (https://github.com/airbnb/rendr) is a great attempt to make this easy for complex web apps to do.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#99

Post by wmt »

I tried the Bustle.com, showcased in the article as a good example of a pure Javascript website, on my Android browser, and the Javascript was used to reserve 25 % of my screen to show me a "BUSTLE"-banner that doesn't go away when I scroll down.

Don't expect your users to have a mouse. The share of web users on their mobile phone has grown from 6,5 % to 17,25 % since June 2011. Any bets on what the share will be in a year or two from now? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Sta...)

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#100

Post by ris »

trafficlight wrote: post #92
kleiba wrote: post #74

There are dinosaurs like me who use the web mostly for reading stuff on websites. I also happen to use an old, quite slow computer as my default machine. It aggrevates me when a site that I try to open because of its textual content takes 30 seconds to render since there's too much Javascript going on. Then I'm typically sitting there thinking: "how hard can it be to display a piece of text?" Because of this, when I…

In all honesty, why should I care about you, the tiny minority? Why should I waste any time at all worrying about you?

Nobody's saying you should. But designing things in a progressive-enhancement-type way will mean that you have no need to worry about all these "minorities" as most things will generally more or less work.

Besides we're all minorities in one way or another. I'm sure I could find some dimension by which you're a minority and you'd be pretty cheesed off if you weren't catered for for some trivial reason.

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