Progressive Enhancement Is Dead

> 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.

We all want wonderful experiences as users. The crux is almost a question of "how we want things to be" and "how we want to get there".

For me, the 100% JS MV movement is wonderful for a specific genre of app: An app that is:

* Behind an intranet

* Behind a paywall

* Behind a login-wall

* Prototypes / Demos / PoCs / etc.

But for the open web -- wikipedia, blogs, discussion forums, journalism (etc.) this movement detracts from the web as a whole, in that it excuses developers from having to worry about degraded and/or non-human consumption of their websites' data.

We have to ask ourselves what we, as humanity, want from the web. Do we really want a web of 100% bespoke JavaScript MV web-apps with no publicly consumable APIs nor semantic representations? If that is the intent and desire of the developers, designers and otherwise educated-concerned web-goers, then fine, let's do that and hope it works out okay...

But there is an alternative that has its roots already planted deep in the web -- the idea and virtue of a web where you can:

* Request an HTTP resource and get back a meaningful and semantically enriched representation

* Access and mash-up each-others' data, so as to better further understanding & enlightenment

* Equally access data and insight via any medium, the latest Chrome or the oldest Nokia

So, please, go ahead and create a 100% JS front-end but, if you are creating something for the open web, consider exposing alternative representations for degraded/non-human consumption. It doesn't have to be progressively enhanced.

Imagine for a moment if Wikipedia was one massive Ember App... And no, Wikipedia is not an exception from the norm -- it is the embodiment of the open web.

First, the accessibility argument is a red herring that I'm getting frustrated people continue to try to throw around. Screen readers support JS, okay? Let's put this argument to bed.

http://words.steveklabnik.com/emberjs-and-accessibility

Okay, thank you for letting me get that off my chest.

Second, one nice thing about "embracing 100% JavaScript" that I talk about in the post is that it requires you to implement a really solid JSON API, because your web site is now a true client that consumes an API. This makes it really easy to integrate with third-party services that consume your content. I agree that putting content behind JavaScript sucks; I'm just advocating that the content be JSON (or some other normalized format), not HTML.

Strongly agree. The day that merely reading Wikipedia requires JavaScript will be the day that the open Web is dead.

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.

There have been techniques for dealing with this for a very long time: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/...

And this is only an issue for pages where you actually want to expose your content to search engines.