Microsoft is end-of-life-ing IE8–10, but that doesn’t mean we should stop supporting them. Some people can’t upgrade for reasons way beyond their control.
The Best Of The Internets
Microsoft readies kill switch for Internet Explorer 8, 9, and 10
The Problem with Progressive Enhancement
Alex Lande doesn’t believe optimizing for a no-JavaScript scenario makes sense, but he does believe in building a robust web experience pays huge dividends.
Progressive enhancement is a tool that will help you build faster, tougher sites. It is an investment in the strength and quality of your application. It will make your users happy because the app will still work, if imperfectly. It might just save you when disaster strikes, and if you’re interested in building the best websites possible, you should give it some thought.
Eloquently put.
Strategies for Website Accessibility, for Ecommerce
Accessibility is just good customer service. If you run an commerce shop, you should be following this article’s advice. Heck, if you run any kind of site, you should do it.
Accessibility Advocacy and Pragmatism
Some very interesting thoughts about accessibility advocacy from Pratik Patel.
“Learn More” Links: You Can Do Better
“Learn More”/“Read More” has definitely inherited the mantle of “Click Here”. Do your users a favor and write descriptive link text. It’s really not that hard.
Updated WebGL Benchmark Results
If you’re into this kind of thing…
Joomla 3.4.6 Fixes Zero-Day Remote Execution Bug Used in the Wild
I harp on this a lot: You can never trust the client (as in “the browser”). In this case, Joomla was not sanitizing User Agent strings before storing them in the database, opening a garage door-sized security hole.
Progressive Enhancement only a client side thing? No!
There are lots of places the progressive enhancement mindset can be put into practice. Of course you do often control the server, so a particular feature being unavailable isn’t usually an issue, but good open source software looks for alternative tools—ImageMagick vs. GD, for example—and adjusts it’s program accordingly.
Turner & Google Vets Create New Content Technology
Some semi-locals (ATL is only 2 hours from Chatty) look to be taking on the likes of ReadSpeaker (who I’ve worked with on Web Standards Sherpa) in the automated HTML-to-spoken-word automation space. If SpeakPage can pull it off, this has some real potential.
Photo upload and progressive enhancement for FixMyStreet
An excellent overview of progressively enhancing image uploads in what many would call a “web app”. See also this great writeup they did on their progressively enhanced maps.