Are progressive improvements and graceful degradation the same thing?

Question

Are progressive improvement and elegant degradation basically the same?

Answer 1

Not really. They solve similar problems, but from different angles.

"Graceful degradation" implies that you have great functionality, and it can deal with the fact that it is less complicated (but still needs to work somehow) in browsers that don't support it. An example of this is the "alt" attributes on images and the <noscript> .

"Progressive enhancement" means that you start with basic content and want to add spiff for browsers that support it, without breaking the site for those who don’t. As an example, imagine you have a list of links that serves as your navigation menu. It works fine, but if you add some javascript, it can give you popup menus, tooltips and all that.

Basically, progressive improvement says, “start with good content, and do it better when you can,” and elegant degradation says: “I suppose you can do this cool stuff ... but if you can't ... well. .. here you can do some other shit. "

Guess which one is better.

Answer 2

Graceful degradation is one of the benefits or results of progressive improvement. If you execute PE correctly, if any part of the system crashes (for example, Javascript), the page will work correctly (if not beautifully).

You can also hear the “separation of concerns,” which is a discipline that is part of the foregoing. For example, no CSS in your HTML, no HTML in your business logic. Each part can be supported independently, and failure of one part will not cause other parts to fail.