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by irq11 2368 days ago
This is called “progressive enhancement”, and is, in fact, the way that you’re supposed to write webpages: they should come pre-rendered, and only if the client has JS enabled do you enable more dynamic features. You fall back to full pageloads to handle form submissions with not-very-clever coding, and can usually preserve most of the functionality of a webapp even without JS.

Until about 5-6 years ago, this was the way people tried to write webapps (they didn’t always get there, but at least they aimed for it). It’s really startling that it’s something that people have already forgotten.

It really isn’t terribly difficult to do this. Frameworks like Rails make it pretty easy to do, out of the box.

1 comments

> This is called “graceful degradation”,

Isn't that strategy "progressive enhancement"?

https://www.w3.org/wiki/Graceful_degradation_versus_progress...

Yes, it is. I corrected my post around the same time you replied. I’ve colloquially used the term I originally cited, but the correct term is progressive enhancement.