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Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

tomdale.net

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Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#231

Post by dllthomas »

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.

"Hardly, you have to consider the additional cost of attempting to support that additional 2%"

That's certainly not how I calculate revenue...

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#232

Post by dllthomas »

marknutter wrote: post #180
TelmoMenezes wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm getting old but sometimes I really really don't want real time updates.

You want to keep hitting refresh, refresh, refresh?

He wants the page not to change under him when he hasn't hit refresh. Personally, race conditions between user and UI drive me crazy.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#233

Post by gnaritas »

dreamfactory wrote: post #227
gnaritas wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the opposite way of putting it. The way of extra work to support edge case users that often aren't worth the effort. Now maybe it's worth it for a big enough site, but for the average site I doubt it ever is. I think it perfectly reasonable to ignore users who disable JavaScript for most websites.

So do I tbh but nobody ever makes a proper business case in practise. If you are going to say that HTML is no longer the default protocol for serving content to browsers (and that it is therefore extra work to support rather than the other way round), it seems like quite a big step. I guess we can rationalise the tattered corpses of Java widgets, Flash, ActiveX, Silverlight by saying they had proprietary roots and no…

Of course HTML is the default protocol, but not vanilla HTML; many sites require JavaScript as well; the default is HTML + JavaScript not just HTML. Supporting non js enhanced HTML is extra work.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#234

Post by ris »

antihero wrote: post #115
ris wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be fine if half the web didn't work for you? How about we say it's fine replacing text with images? We could always use alt tags for accessibility. The number of people who ever actually select/copy text from your website will be <1%, so why not just do away with it and get the text in any font we like, with any rendering style & layout we like?

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…

"Because that is an utterly ridiculous strawman."

Of course it is, but it's clearly an admitted strawman.

What's wrong with people these days? You can't rhetorically explore someone's views without everyone jumping in and shouting "strawman" as if it's their new favourite word.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#235

Post by dragonwriter »

ris wrote: post #234
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…

"Because that is an utterly ridiculous strawman." Of course it is, but it's clearly an admitted strawman. What's wrong with people these days? You can't rhetorically explore someone's views without everyone jumping in and shouting "strawman" as if it's their new favourite word.

> What's wrong with people these days? You can't rhetorically explore someone's views without everyone jumping in and shouting "strawman" as if it's their new favourite word.

A strawman -- which, as you admit, this was -- is very different from "rhetorically exploring someone's views". Its "rhetorically exploring something distinct from the views of your opponent, and using it to impugn the views of your opponent."

Which, you know, makes people upset.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#236

Post by asdasf »

integraton wrote: post #67

Sometimes I wonder whether advocates for heavy client-side JavaScript ever bother to test on mobile devices, because it very much seems that in the majority of cases they don't. The vast majority of JavaScript-based "show HN" submissions I've seen don't work on mobile browsers well or at all, to the point where I've been trained not to click them. This submission from a few days ago is an example, and last I checked…

>since every thick-client media site is intermittently a bad citizen on mobile browsers

Not just mobile browsers. They are horrible everywhere that isn't chrome or firefox.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#237

Post by asdasf »

gnaritas wrote: post #192
dreamfactory wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the opposite way of putting it. The way of extra work to support edge case users that often aren't worth the effort. Now maybe it's worth it for a big enough site, but for the average site I doubt it ever is. I think it perfectly reasonable to ignore users who disable JavaScript for most websites.

It isn't extra work or an edge case. It is doing the baseline correct thing. I can't count the number of fad obsessed "web developers" who ask us why we serve html instead of javascript crap, while they take 3 times as long to produce a broken version of the same thing.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#238

Post by asdasf »

leokun wrote: post #36
anonymousab wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is silly. If I'm just trying to view a news article from yesterday or a year ago, I shouldn't have to worry about what some silly script is trying to do. If the core of the content is or should be text, then there's no need for countless silly layers around it.

Maybe you want a PDF instead.

Or maybe some sort of "hypertext" document. That could contain links to other such documents, allowing users to easily navigate content. All this interlinked content could form some sort of "web" even.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#239

Post by gnaritas »

dllthomas wrote: post #231
gnaritas wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Hardly, you have to consider the additional cost of attempting to support that additional 2%" That's certainly not how I calculate revenue...

Revenue isn't the right metric; profit is. My point is that chasing revenue isn't what good businesses do, they chase profit. I don't care about 2% additional revenue if doing so reduces profit due to the extra development and maintenance overhead and neither should any sane business person.

Re: Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

#240

Post by ritchiea »

rimantas wrote: post #205
ritchiea wrote: post #63

At some point recently, the browser transformed from being an awesome interactive document viewer into being the world’s most advanced, widely-distributed application runtime. This is the key sentence in the article and this is why I was motivated to become a web developer. Recently someone asked me if I felt like I was missing out by doing most of my programming on the web since desktop apps are "real programming" a…

That key sentence is at least half wrong. The „most advanced“ part at least. And web was never the best environment for writing apps. And it never will be. It's like hoping to transform the fork into the spoon. I have spent one and a half decades in it, and it may be becoming bearable environment, but far far from the best. Unless it's the only thing you know, then it is the best by definition.

Maybe we're reading that sentence differently? I read it as "the most widely distributed runtime that is also relatively advanced." I took it as a given that Tom Dale does not believe the web is the most advanced programming environment.
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