Pixel Thread

Progressive enhancement is a way of building websites that emphasises accessibility, semantic markup, with external stylesheet and javascript.

I dropped the phrase into a conversation with Adam (top notch interface developer) recently. He hadn’t heard the term, so I explained and he said:

“Ah - you mean a well built website!”

Of course, he’s right. When the term ‘Progressive Enhancement’ first showed up, it wasn’t necessarily accepted that this was the best way to build sites. But over the past few years the internet has grown up and sites that are built to these standards have become a lot more commonplace.

The very term ’standards’ implies a lack of creativity, but this isn’t the case. There’s a very good book called Web Standards Creativity all about getting creative with code while still adhering to standards and guidelines.

Sometimes the most creative work is done working within constraints - the constraints force the creator to innovate.

sIFR uses javascript, CSS and Flash to replace short passages of plain text with text rendered in any typeface - regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems.

sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses

Update: sIFR 3 is now available here , although still in beta I think…