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What is Progressive Enhancement?

A web design strategy that starts with basic functionality for all browsers and progressively adds advanced features for capable ones.

Progressive enhancement builds from a baseline of semantic HTML that works everywhere, adds CSS for visual presentation, then layers JavaScript for interactivity. This ensures content is accessible even if CSS or JavaScript fails to load. The approach contrasts with graceful degradation (building for modern browsers first, then patching for older ones). Examples include forms that work without JavaScript (standard submit), images with proper alt text, and server-side rendering with client-side enhancement. Progressive enhancement aligns with web accessibility, SEO (search engines primarily read HTML), and resilience. Feature detection (not browser detection) guides which enhancements to apply.

Related Terms

JSON
JavaScript Object Notation — a lightweight data interchange format that is easy for humans to read and machines to parse.
DOM (Document Object Model)
A programming interface for HTML documents that represents the page structure as a tree of objects that can be manipulated with JavaScript.
CSS Flexbox
A CSS layout model that provides efficient arrangement of items within a container, handling alignment, distribution, and spacing.
Web Components
A set of browser-native APIs for creating reusable, encapsulated custom HTML elements with their own styling and behavior.
CSS Grid
A two-dimensional CSS layout system for creating complex grid-based designs with rows and columns.
TypeScript
A typed superset of JavaScript that adds static type checking, interfaces, and advanced IDE support to JavaScript development.
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