A little insight from Andy Clarke's new book

[tomjeatt]

I'm reading my way through Hardboiled Web Design (I know it's Christmas Eve and I should be wrapping presents, but I'm still at work!) and I came across this little bit of wisdom:


You might be surprised, but we're already working the hardboiled way when we build font stacks in CSS. We design from the top down, starting with our ideal typeface, then fall back to a series of considered alternatives.

Extending this approach to the major parts of our designs liberates our creativity and allows us to use any and all technologies to create designs that are appropriately tailored to any browser's capabilities.I like the thinking behind this approach (the book's major premise really chimes with me, although more on that when I've finished it) and I like how he's placed it in a frame of reference which all web designers will be familiar with.

[David]

The principle is a good one and was often referred to as "graceful degradation" - in other words, your design would degrade to work satisfactorily in all browsers (that usually meant IE). More recently, the same concept has developed a new and more positive title; "progressive enhancement" or "progressive enrichment". Which essentially means, give those with capable browsers an enhanced experience but allow those with less capable browsers (IE again!) an acceptable experience. This has become particularly important with respect to the use of CSS3 because not all browsers support all parts of CSS3.