Comments on: My Thoughts On Progressive Enhancement

By: Maria Porto

Maria Porto — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:46:35 +0000

I believe it’s all about your main target, what king of hardware this audience owns. That’s why research and statistics are so important.

By: 10 Things I always forget before launching a website… | The Design O'Blog by Niki Brown

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:59:32 +0000

[...] the site appears relatively the same and functional in the lesser-privileged browsers. Consider using progressive enhancement for browsers that can handle nifty things like border-radius and [...]

By: Emily Gonsalves

Emily Gonsalves — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 20:34:01 +0000

I agree.

Personally, I’ve used rounded corners a few times, generally because it’s a lot faster to implement than slicing images. I always consider if it’s good for the design before doing it.

And while I know there are fancy fixes out there to make it work in more browsers; square corners don’t break the layout. They just don’t look as polished.

I think many of us go through the phase of “blink tag? That is COOL stuff” when we’re starting out. I guess it’s a reflection of how excited we are about learning web design. After a while, I think we start to consider more carefully what actually adds to the content, what makes it better than defaults.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:19:49 +0000

This question is about a new application of the mentality that says that you should do something because you can. It applies to any medium, or really any decision a person makes (my car can go 120mph, but should I take it there?) There are definitely appropriate situations to use rounded corners, opacity, or what have you. (Was blink ever really a good thing, though? I always thought it was visual torture.) And you have to know how to do it because you might have a situation that calls for it. Just don’t use techniques, visual stylings, interactive flourishes, etc. that you don’t need to. Maybe that’s easier said than done. Just a couple weeks ago, I heard the words, “We’re paying for four-color, so we should get our money’s worth and use more colors,” come out of my mouth.

By: Niki Brown

Niki Brown — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:21:41 +0000

Wes

I don’t think that everything in web design is decoration. If a design element has good reasoning behind it and helps communicate a message it’s not bling

I’m just pointing out that we should think before adding these elements to our designs.

By: Wes Baker

Wes Baker — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:49:01 +0000

It’s all a need thing, but even that is the wrong word for it. I noticed your tweet about bling and couldn’t help but think that we could make sites much like they were made 10 years ago, with gray backgrounds, black text, blue links and the groove chiseled horizontal rules (when we weren’t using the animated gif horizontal rules).

Much of what we do is embellishment and bling, especially once we get past the markup. So, yes, this is all bling, but its the bling we’ve been shouting for for the past years and don’t use shadows and border-radius on a site that won’t benefit from it, but definitely use it when you start slicing out an image of text, or when you start using the opacity property.