Progressive Enhancement Makes Me Sad
This is a weird piece, since it&#x27;s clear by the end that it&#x27;s satire, but he has a few good points (whether he knows it or not):<p>1. &quot;But who’s to say there’s going to <i>be</i> any users?&quot; -&gt; Which is true.  If you&#x27;re just starting a project out, you have to decided whether it&#x27;s worth an extra X hours&#x2F;days&#x2F;weeks for any given bit of technical improvement, whether it&#x27;s progressive enhancement or something else.  If it expands my potential user base by 10%, but doubles my time to market, it may not be worth it.<p>2. &quot;The less time I spend on creating a robust architecture (boring) the more time I have for creating features.&quot; -&gt; Ignoring the &quot;boring&quot; remark, this is true.  I could spend a near infinite amount of time improving my architecture, but at a certain point I reach diminishing returns.  Where I cut off my robustness work depends on the nature of the project, but every project has <i>some</i> point at which you&#x27;d improve user experience more by adding a feature than improving performance.  For an early prototype, that point may be quite soon.<p>3. &quot;It’s all web apps now&quot; -&gt; I think the author is aware of this, but there <i>are</i> many apps which just don&#x27;t fit particularly well into a document.  It&#x27;s not clear whether the author really thinks all such apps are trivial (eg detecting your dog&#x27;s age), but I&#x27;d argue there are plenty of substantial apps that don&#x27;t fit that model well, and benefit substantially from being a full-on js-heavy web app.