Christian Heilmann

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Archive for the ‘progressive enhancement’ Category

Pragmatic Progressive Enhancement

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

Last week I went to AKQA in London to give a brown-bag presentation on progressive enhancement. I took this chance to vent some of my ideas on the subject and counteract some of the criticisms I heard about the need for enhancing web solutions progressively.

I’ve come up with the following “Seven rules of progressive enhancement”:

  1. Separate as much as possible
  2. Build on things that work
  3. Generate dependent markup
  4. Test for everything before you apply it
  5. Explore the environment
  6. Load on demand
  7. Modularize code

Instead of explaining them here, I’ve used a longer train ride to write up an article on the subject explaining the details of all the “rules” and examples of why and how to use them: Pragmatic Progressive Enhancement.

The article is licensed with creative commons, so you are very much invited to use and remix it to your needs.

I will upload my slides together with a video of the presentation once I got the material and checked if the video quality is good enough for publication.

Reason #21312 to build accessible data tables – convert them directly to YUI flash charts!

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

Following up the success of the data table to Google chart post, and the request in the comments to do the same for YUI charts, go and check the YUIblog today (like, now) and get your fix there:

example of how the script creates a chart above a data table from the table data

The elevator pitch:

  • Create a valid HTML data table
  • Add two script tags to the body and a class to each table
  • Have tasty pie charts above each of the tables