Stuart writes up his thoughts on progressive enhancement following the great discussions at Edge Conf:
So I’m not going to be talking about progressive enhancement any more. I’m going to be talking about availability. About reach. About my web apps being for everyone even when the universe tries to stop it.
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.
This proposal is exactly what I was asking for!
C’mon browsers, let’s make this happen!
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!
It’s a shame that the newest Safari release is overshadowed by Apple’s shenanigans and subsequent U-turn because there’s some great stuff in there.
I really like what they’re doing with web apps added to the dock:
Safari adds support for the
shortcutsmanifest member on macOS Sonoma. This gives you a mechanism in the manifest file for defining custom menu commands that will appear in the File menu and the Dock context menu.
Web Push on iOS is nearing its one year anniversary. It’s still mostly useless.
Sad, but true. And here’s why:
On iOS, for a website to be able to ask the user to grant the push notification permission, it needs to be installed to the home screen.
No other browser on any of the other platforms requires you to install a website for it to be able to send push notifications.
Apple is within their rights to withhold Web Push to installed apps. One could argue it’s not even an unreasonable policy - if Apple made installing a web app at least moderately straightforward. As it is, they have buried it and hidden important functionality behind it.
I really, really hope that the Safari team are reading this.
Having fun with view transitions and scroll-driven animations.
It’s kind of ridiculous that this functionality doesn’t exist yet.
Here’s Clearleft’s approach to browser support. You can use it too (it’s CC-licensed).
A performance boost in Chrome.
If a browser feature can be used as a progressive enhancement, you don’t have to wait for all browsers to support it.