Technical Credit by Chris Taylor

Riffing on an offhand comment I made about progressive enhancement being a form of “technical credit”, Chris dives deep into what exactly that means. There’s some really great thinking here.

With such a wide array of both expected and unexpected properties of the current technological revolution, building our systems in such a way to both be resilient to potential failures and benefit from unanticipated events surely is a no-brainer.

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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

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JavaScript dos and donts @ Mu-An Chiou

Straightforward smart sensible advice that you can apply to any feature on a website.

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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.

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Developers Rail Against JavaScript ‘Merchants of Complexity’ - The New Stack

Perhaps the tide is finally turning against complex web frameworks.

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Reckoning: Part 1 — The Landscape - Infrequently Noted

I want to be a part of a frontend culture that accepts and promotes our responsibilities to others, rather than wallowing in self-centred “DX” puffery. In the hierarchy of priorities, users must come first.

Alex doesn’t pull his punches in this four-part truth-telling:

  1. The Landscape
  2. Object Lesson
  3. Caprock
  4. The Way Out

The React anti-pattern of hugely bloated single-page apps has to stop. And we can stop it.

Success or failure is in your hands, literally. Others in the equation may have authority, but you have power.

Begin to use that power to make noise. Refuse to go along with plans to build YAJSD (Yet Another JavaScript Disaster). Engineering leaders look to their senior engineers for trusted guidance about what technologies to adopt. When someone inevitably proposes the React rewrite, do not be silent. Do not let the bullshit arguments and nonsense justifications pass unchallenged. Make it clear to engineering leadership that this stuff is expensive and is absolutely not “standard”.

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Related posts

Making the website for Research By The Sea

Having fun with view transitions and scroll-driven animations.

Browser support

Here’s Clearleft’s approach to browser support. You can use it too (it’s CC-licensed).

Speculation rules

A performance boost in Chrome.

Baseline progressive enhancement

If a browser feature can be used as a progressive enhancement, you don’t have to wait for all browsers to support it.

My approach to HTML web components

Naming custom elements, naming attributes, the single responsibility principle, and communicating across components.