6 Myths of Progressive Web Apps
This is different from how I understood the term...  here&#x27;s something closer to what formed my understanding.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;web&#x2F;fundamentals&#x2F;codelabs&#x2F;your-first-pwapp&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;web&#x2F;fundamentals&#x2F;codelabs&#x2F;your...</a><p>&quot;Progressive - Works for every user, regardless of browser choice because it&#x27;s built with progressive enhancement as a core tenet.&quot;<p>My impression was that a progressive web app was built with the simplest technology and UI at first (simple HTML and CSS), and enhanced <i>progressively</i> for different environments (javascript for browsers, various mobile environments)<p>I like this approach a lot because it preserved the ability to do something simple when that was all that was needed, but with the option of adding more complexity in exchanged for a more sophisticated UI later, as needed.<p>This approach, I think, also gained popularity as a counter point to the pure SPA, single page app, which required using a more complicated and powerful front end framework.<p>I noticed some people felt that a progressive web app was equivalent to elegant degradation to HTML for javascript heavy apps.  To be clear, this is just how I thought of things (by no means is this an industry definition), but I saw that as slightly inaccurate.  A pure SPA from a dev point of view can degrade to HTML without error, but it wouldn&#x27;t have been built iteratively from simplest HTML and enhanced later.  Likewise, a developer could add javascript to a simple HTML layout in a way that no longer degrades gracefully.<p>Personally, I think that progressive enhancement is the right way to go, and will continue to be so, for a huge number of apps for a long time.  I see this as similar to the NoSql cycle - many of the technologies that emerged are extremely good and critical to many types of databases, but SQL databases actually do meet the business needs (and scalability) for a huge number of projects.  Similarly, there really are apps that should be written as SPAs with powerful front end JS frameworks, but this is currently very over-applied, resulting in high complexity costs that had either no benefit or not nearly enough benefit to justify the increase in development and maintenance costs.