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Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

tomdale.net

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Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#181

Post by dreamfactory »

gnaritas wrote: post #170
dreamfactory wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...because if it's say 98%, you have just thrown away 2% revenue.

Hardly, you have to consider the additional cost of attempting to support that additional 2%; it could very well cost more than it's worth in development time and long term complexity. Of course that's an app specific decision. Every market you specialize for has a cost, short term and long term, so it has to be worth it financially; businesses aren't in the habit of just being nice for no reason.

Another way to put it is that vanilla HTML will support the full market so you have to be confident that moving away from it will cover that margin in revenue or savings just to break even. On a large commerce site for example, even a small percentage of revenue could be a staggering amount.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#182

Post by nirvdrum »

EGreg wrote: post #12

Javascript is great for making more efficient sites. Here's why: 1) Static resources can be cached on a CDN and composited on the client instead of an overloaded app server 2) You can load data instead of heavy and repetitive HTML over the wire 3) You can cache the data in the client and re-use it later, making for snappier interfaces That said, you have to watch out for URLs. Just because you can write everything wi…

I'm actually going fairly tired of sites trying to push everything into the client to free up their servers. I routinely run into sites that easily peg an entire core and/or use > 1 GB RAM. A gross generalization, but if you're not able to tune it on the back-end, you probably can't tune it on the front-end, and you're still making your users suffer.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#183

Post by kintamanimatt »

robbyking wrote: post #165
kintamanimatt wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1% is a small percentage but can make up quite a large number of people.

I completely agree, but if a version test wins by more than a few percentage points, it usually makes sense to implement the feature even if it does make the page inaccessible to 1% of users.

I honestly doubt you'd be saying that if you were part of that 1%!

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#184

Post by cgag »

eru wrote: post #177
dllthomas wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see that that actually has any bearing on what I said, though. Reality will always give some hard bound, on any practical problem.

Not if you are prepared to buy more RAM (or disk space for swapping) as the program is running.

There's only so much RAM in the universe.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#185

Post by pessimizer »

michaelwww wrote: post #179
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…

You're in a demographic that clearly chooses not to spend money or doesn't have any money to spend, which is not attractive to people trying to make money on the internet. I'm guessing government sites would be the only sites that are interested in serving you.

Just because I don't want to spend money on a new phone or a new computer doesn't mean that I don't want to spend money on a new car.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#187

Post by strictfp »

mmastrac wrote: post #13
Pinckney wrote: post #3

I think the point that's overlooked here is that the offenders aren't the clever apps that would be impossible to write without javascript. Go ahead and write those. I'm happy for you, really. The problem is pages that require javascript to display static content. There are very few good reasons for an article, or an image gallery, or a homepage that could have been displayed just fine a decade ago to now need javasc…

What, exactly, is the issue with writing a simple content site that requires JS? If you aren't pulling in half a MB of JS, but it does require scripting to function, I don't see the problem. Just because I could spend the effort to be progressive doesn't constrain me to have to do it. It doesn't make me a lazy programmer either: just pragmatic. 99.99% of the people visiting my site have JS enabled and I'm happy to su…

Because most of those solutions have their own half-assed impls of * Loading indicators * Navigation through history * Error display * Scrolling I could go on.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#188

Post by antihero »

pekk wrote: post #148
antihero wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that is an utterly ridiculous strawman. Using images for text is firstly almost entirely pointless, and has many many drawbacks that using JavaScript doesn't. For instance, it's a pain in the arse to maintain, it breaks text reflowing, it's huge, you have to deal with image compression, and it likely ruins the ability of search engines to spider your content without OCR. Not to mention that any decent screen…

Not as ridiculous as you think - a large amount of content is locked into PDFs which present effectively as images, and HTML wasn't always as dominant as it is today. The idea that it is actively shameful to use Lynx is strange and antithetical to the way the web was originally designed - the user agent is SUPPOSED to be in control of presentation, the markup is SUPPOSED to be semantic.

It's not that it's shameful to use Lynx. I love Lynx. However, the web is continuously evolving, and things like Lynx are not keeping up - I mean, does it support WebGL and HTML5 video?

I absolutely think there's a place for a text-based browser still, however, one that is designed with modern considerations.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#189

Post by antihero »

qu4z-2 wrote: post #140
antihero wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that is an utterly ridiculous strawman. Using images for text is firstly almost entirely pointless, and has many many drawbacks that using JavaScript doesn't. For instance, it's a pain in the arse to maintain, it breaks text reflowing, it's huge, you have to deal with image compression, and it likely ruins the ability of search engines to spider your content without OCR. Not to mention that any decent screen…

I would argue it's fairly similar to using javascript to load documents. If you have a web-app, I'm a huge fan of javascript/client-side rendering. If you've got a blog, not so much.

Well of course, tools for the job.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#190

Post by kreper »

gergles wrote: post #72
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'd rather have Flash + HTML that I can parse and view on any application rather than JS that works on the list of Approved Browsers that were all released within the past week. Nobody would've made a Flash-only site but for some reason JS-only sites that shut out anyone with slow computers, old computers, mobile browsers that aren't Safari, etc. are totally okay.

All kinds of wrong here.
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