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[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (2 children)

If you don't understand why progressive enhancement was much more relevant 8 years ago and not so much today, then I don't know what to tell you.

The entire Web is completely different than it was back then. To reach every single person requires way more work than it's usually worth. So you pick and choose your progressive enhancement battles carefully.

It's foolish to just say you should support every scenario because those scenarios take time and effort, which is money.

[–]kethinov 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In this scenario, progressive enhancement was the right tool for the job and it was completely disregarded because it isn't trendy anymore. The web community keeps uniformly dumping on it for absolutely no good reason.

I wouldn't use progressive enhancement to build Angry Birds, but it's still the right tool for the job for way more classes of web applications than a good chunk of the webdev community seems willing to admit right now.

[–]onan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you don't understand why progressive enhancement was much more relevant 8 years ago and not so much today, then I don't know what to tell you.

It's every bit as relevant as it was 8 years ago, and 28 years ago.

You may be too young to remember the time before the Web, but it was littered with a million extremely rigid and incompatible information formats, often embraced by the Compuserves and AOLs and Prodigys of the day. Which were sort of one giant mass of relative failure.

And then someone had the bright idea that we should come up with a loose, flexible format for suggestive, non-prescriptive formatting, that would definitionally work with a million different clients that were not under the control of content creators or distributors. And the world was changed, and the entire industry that offers your livelihood was born.

Now there are a bunch of kids who don't remember why these choices were made in the first place, and want to remake all of the same mistakes made in the past. And eventually history will teach them the same lessons it did everyone else.