Progressive Enhancement is one of the key ways of ensuring accessibility. However, it has been commonly known to be applied to using JavaScript. John Resig explains a method, called Progressive CSS Enhancement.
An interesting technique, using JavaScript to detects CSS support by a device. So the web site offers modern CSS techniques only if the device, like a browser, passes their test. Innovative.
The only catch is when JavaScript is disabled or worse, partially enabled, in a device and hence the CSS support, though present, is not detected. These are dependency problems, because now we depend on JavaScript to decide on the CSS. Since graceful degradation and progressive enhancement are two sides of the same coin, I cannot help but wonder if it will be better if graceful degradation is inbuilt into CSS standards. Of course, everything will finally depend that vendors to conform to it, which is not happening today and is the root cause of this effort.
March 15th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
And Using CSS to detect Javascript support.