Why is progressive enhancement better that graceful degradation? Well, to be honest, you could say that they are both the same side of the same coin, in as much as the final aim is that your site has a few barriers to use as possible, but personally I find the progressive enhancement way of doing things is the more creative.
I found this great little slideshow by Chris Heilmann on Ajaxian (top site if you are into geeky AJAX and JavaScript stuff like I am), and after watching it, I had to share it here.
Pragmatic Progressive Enhancement
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: programmingyuiydnakqa progressiveenhancementpr...)
There are a couple of killer quotes in the slideshow too....
"There is hardly any more hostile environment than the web" - So true, but thats one of the things that makes web development such a challenge, and so much fun!
"..we work in a paranoid fashion" - LOL, yeah, especially if you add any of the IE browsers into the mix!
"Separation of Structure (HTML), presentation (CSS) and behaviour (JS) is an absolute must." - Thats almost an understatement. Without separation you have no chance of either clean mark-up, graceful degradation, or progressive enahncement.
"With great power, comes great responsibility" - This applies as much to those Flashers out there as those using HTML, CSS and JS. Just because you can make that object move across the page, change colour, load data from some third party website, and bounce on mouseover, doesn't mean you should actually do it!
My personal favourite is "If you simulate, do it right. Don't break expectations". I have had to remove or revise functionality on more than one occasion because it works, but not in the way the use would expect it to.
Go forth and progressively enhance all that you code....
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