Always looking forward

Graceful degradation vs. Progressive enhancement

Two methods of development. With mobile surfing constantly rising in popularity during the last couple of years, there has been an interesting shift in the way many web designers build their designs. When I started building website templates back in 1996, I learned to make the designs work in all browsers – including text-based browsers which did not even support CSS. The way I did it was to build the complete design for modern web browsers first and then make sure that the design would be possible to browse even with the most basic text-based browser, including the mobile browsers of that time.

In short, the target was to always make sure that designs would degrade gracefully if displayed on an older web browser. The code structure would be built in a way that kept a text-only, no-CSS version of the HTML output logical and well-structured. This concept was commonly called "graceful degradation", and it simply means "display a basic and simple version if the full layout can not be rendered". There were many ways to achieve that effect, some were good and others were really nice – but at the cost of usability. I wanted to keep things simple.

Aaron Gustafson "Understanding Progressive Enhancement".
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/understandingprogressiveenhancement
09 Jan. 2012. Click Here