Dispatches From The Internets

[Insert Clickbait Headline About Progressive Enhancement Here]

Late last week, Josh Korr, a project manager at Viget, posted at length about what he sees as a fundamental flaw with the argument for progressive enhancement. In reading the post, it became clear to me that Josh really doesn’t have a good grasp on progressive enhancement or the reasons its proponents think it’s a good philosophy to follow. Despite claiming to be “an expert at spotting fuzzy rhetoric and teasing out what’s really being said”, Josh makes a lot of false assumptions and inferences. My response would not have fit in a comment, so here it is…



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Les défis du “progressive enhancement”

This is a nice overview (in French) of how Hopwork handles progressive enhancement in their SaaS product. Their back-end is Java too. It’s nice to see folks talking about how to progressively enhance products in that language; we don’t hear about that often enough.



I totally forgot about print style sheets

This is an excellent summary of print style recommendations from Manuel Matuzovic. I’m glad I wrote the tweet that prompted it :-)

See also:



Mac-like Special Characters in Windows

I am a bit of a geek for proper punctuation: Em dashes… en dashes… curly quotes… ellipses… I love them all! Prior to 2007, I was a long-time Windows user and was a master of the Alt + numeric code system of entering special characters on that operating system. For nearly a decade, however, I’ve been writing and developing on a Mac and I absolutely love how much easier it is to use special characters. When I started setting up my new Surface Book, I began searching for a way to bring Mac-like special character entry to Windows 10. [^1]: I actually memorized a ton of the codes, much to my amazement. I still remember a few, but I am thankful to have reclaimed a bit of that memory space over the last few years.


iOS doesn’t support Progressive Web Apps, so what?

As usual, Jason Grigsby nails it:

  • Progressive Web Apps still work on iOS
  • Progressive Web Apps perform better on iOS
  • Billions of people use browsers that support Progressive Web Apps
  • Apple appears to be warming to Progressive Web App technology
  • Progressive Web Apps benefit all users

Done and done.