Enhance’n’drag’n’drop

I’ve spent the last week implementing a new feature over at The Session. I had forgotten how enjoyable it is to get completely immersed in a personal project, thinking about everything from database structures right through to CSS animations,

I won’t bore you with the details of this particular feature—which is really only of interest if you play traditional Irish music—but I thought I’d make note of one little bit of progressive enhancement.

One of the interfaces needed for this feature was a form to re-order items in a list. So I thought to myself, “what’s the simplest technology to enable this functionality?” I came up with a series of select elements within a form.

It’s not the nicest of interfaces, but it works pretty much everywhere. Once I had built that—and the back-end functionality required to make it all work—I could think about how to enhance it.

I brought it up at the weekly Clearleft front-end pow-wow (featuring special guest Jack Franklin). I figured that drag’n’drop would be the obvious enhancement, but I didn’t know if there were any “go-to” libraries for implementing it; I haven’t paid much attention to the state of drag’n’drop since the old IE implement was added to HTML5.

Nobody had any particular recommendations so I did a bit of searching. I came across Dragula, which looked pretty solid. It’s made by the super-smart Nicolás Bevacqua, who I know shares my feelings about progressive enhancement. To my delight, I was able to get it working within minutes.

There’s a little bit of mustard-cutting going on: does the dragula object exist, and does the browser understand querySelector? If so, the select elements are hidden and the drag’n’drop is enabled. Then, whenever an item in the list is dragged and dropped, the corresponding (hidden) select element is updated …so that time I spent making the simpler non-drag’n’drop interface was time well spent: I didn’t need to do anything extra on the server to handle the data from the updated interface.

It’s a simple example but it demonstrates that the benefits of starting with the simpler universal interface before upgrading to the smoother experience.

Progressive enhancement brings everyone in - The History of the Web

This is a great history of the idea of progressive enhancement:

It is an idea that has been lasting and enduring for two decades, and will continue.

You can use Web Components without the shadow DOM

So what are the advantages of the Custom Elements API if you’re not going to use the Shadow DOM alongside it?

1. Obvious Markup
2. Instantiation is More Consistent
3. They’re Progressive Enhancement Friendly

Request for developer feedback: customizable select  |  Blog  |  Chrome for Developers

I’m very glad to see that work has moved away from a separate selectmenu element to instead enhancing the existing select element—I could never see an upgrade path for selectmenu, but now there are plenty of opportunities for progressive enhancement.

HTML Web Components Can Have a Little Shadow DOM, As A Treat | Scott Jehl, Web Designer/Developer

This is an interesting thought from Scott: using Shadow DOM in HTML web components but only as a way of providing sort-of user-agent styles:

providing some default, low-specificity styles for our slotted light-dom HTML elements while allowing them to be easily overridden.

Futuristic Progressive Enhancement - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

We’re all tired of: write some code, come back to it in six months, try to make it do more, and find the whole project is broken until you upgrade everything.

Progressive enhancement allows you to do the opposite: write some code, come back to it in six months, and it’s doing more than the day you wrote it!