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Giving your future self a little credit with progressive enhancement

This article alludes to the concept of technical credit, which is the antithesis of tech debt. It is the idea that putting in some effort now will make things easier on ourselves in future.

The article describes the difference between progressive enhancement and graceful degradation, and cites some useful statistics. Around 0.2% of users ‘opt out’ of the modern web by disabling JavaScript. But at least around an extra 0.9% face pages where JavaScript simply fails to load, for whatever reason. These figures are based on a 2013 study run by Government Digital Service. The author re-ran GDS’s experiment and put the figure closer to 3% of users for whom JavaScript doesn’t load.

The author underlines the fact that these are 3% of visits, not users – so the real figure of ‘how many users fail to get some of your JavaScript?’ is probably much higher. He visualises this with an animated gif of emoji faces, representing users on their journey on your site.

The article is full of thought provoking soundbites like “An escalator can never break… it can only become stairs”. Worth a read!

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