Progressive Enhancement (PE)

Progressive enhancement (PE)

Progressive enhancement is a strategy for web design that emphasizes core web page content first. It emphasizes accessiblity, semantic HTML markup, and external stylesheet and scripting technologies. The part of the development process in focus here (stage 2 of progressive enhancement) includes:

  1. Prepare and organize files.
  2. Create HTML document.
  3. Identify content types and mark up appropriately (aim for semantic correctness).
  4. Test and observe (default) presentation.
  5. Validate, correct to remove errors, and re-test.
PE approach Core principles

Progressive Enhancement consists of core principles:

  1. basic content should be accessible to all web browsers
  2. basic functionality should be accessible to all web browsers
  3. sparse, semantic markup contains all content.
  4. enhanced layout is provided by externally linked CSS
  5. enhanced behaviour is provided by unobtrusive, externally linked JavaScript.
  6. end-user web browser preferences are respected

Read further Progressive enhancement (wikiwand)