Stop Breaking the Web

I think the big takeaway here is that progressive enhancement was a thing, and then it wasn't. What happened? To me, frameworks didn't come with a solution out-of-the-box, so people eschewed it in favor of quick results. It was fairly easy to do progressive enhancement when your html was generated server-side, and you let jQuery do the rest once the page downloaded. Your first page loaded very fast, and you didn't need to load another page after that (if you didn't want to). How do we fix this with a modern framework? The author mentions shared rendering libraries, React being one. But why do we need to share our rendering? Couldn't we just render the basic first-page content in whatever rendering engine we prefer on the server-side? After all, all we're rendering is markup. Our styling is all handled by our CSS. I'm not saying you can't use shared rendering, but there are lots of ways to render html and a using javascript library is just one of them. Is anyone here doing progressive enhancement on their sites?

Yarp! We render a site on the server that will work with nothing else. For example links are real links which point to places that can render real pages. For fully enabled browsers, the JS will then preventDefault on them and do something fancy in the browser with HTML5 History if its there, but it's all optional

ie no href='#' business!