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.

I’ve written a lot about unobtrusive JavaScript before, but I never really held a workshop about it. Well, now as part of the Paris Web Conference later this week in Paris, France I am giving one which is already sold out and I am very much looking forward to it.

As part of the workshop I prepared my materials and wanted to have a nice outline to follow. I took this as an opportunity to build up on the older materials and the outcome of this exercise is that I managed to define the rules of unobtrusive JavaScript, which are:

• Do not make any assumptions
• Find your hooks and relationships
• Leave traversing to the experts
• Understand browsers and users
• Understand Events
• Play well with others
• Work for the next developer

I’ve explained them all in some detail here: The seven rules of unobtrusive JavaScript

After the workshop I will also add the code demos with some more detail, but that’ll be most probably after @media Ajax.

I hope this is helpful to you, it is creative commons, so use it for good.