Graceful Degredation – What does it really mean?
It goes hand in hand with unobtrusive javascript, and really is just another name for the same thing. Here are some quotes from some decent articles on the subject:
from Dan’s Web Tips by Daniel Tobias
“Graceful Degradation” is an important principle in Web design. It means that, when you put in features designed to take advantage of the latest and greatest features of newer browsers, you should do it in a way that older browsers, and browsers letting users disable particular features, can “step down” to a method that still allows access to the basic content of the site, though perhaps not as snazzy in appearance.
from Augmentative authoring
- a different look at “graceful degradation” in Web authoring
The phrase “graceful degradation” is often used to describe the idea that a Web page that uses special technologies for presentation enhancements, animation, interactivity, etc., should “degrade” to a simpler, yet fully functional page in circumstancies where the technologies are not applicable. This document takes a somewhat different view: instead of considering how to provide “fallbacks” for various advanced constructs, we consider how to create first a robust document that works always, then augment it by providing optional alternatives to the simple constructs. We’ll discuss the different techniques that are needed for different enhancements.
We currently have a lot of old legacy javascript menus which contain all of the links to the various places on our sites. In our latest efforts, dubbed T2, we have introduced Spry and YUI libraries which use non-obtrusive javascript to manage the menus, sliding panels, collapsible panels and popups. In the article JS Menus – Good or Evil? the author highlights a few good reasons to get rid of those old javascript only menus and replace them with the new-fangled way of doing things in the Web 2.0 world, like Suckerfish. This article was written sometime in 2003, so it is quite old (as is the Suckerfish reference), however you will find after looking at the Suckerfish article that the SpryMenu we are using is actually uses this exact unobtrusive theory.
