Pollyfilling and Performance
Consider this post more like stream of thought, rather than complete manifesto, or whatever this looks like.
Today I read http://www.impressivewebs.com/browser-performance-pickle/
This article is just about problem, maybe about problems our industry has with older browsers.
Progessive enhancement is awesome, but how in "real life" really make it working, how to convince you'r boss that this is good, how to convince customer? Sometimes You just CAN'T.
On the other side we have pollyfils, we make it working in older browsers. Add hacks, more html, even more CSS. Code is ugly but finally works everywhere! Everyone is happy besides You. After some time they want to change something on site, and You tell them ridiculously long estimation. Why, because this is nightmare to maintain, to test again and again if this little tiny images for shadows works as supposed in IE6. And what tell You them when this site is really slow in this old browsers? Impossible to fix. Google ranking is against any SEO specialist? Impossible to fix. (thanks Google BTW.)
This is stupid to make everything working and looking 'the same' in this older browsers. This make them slow to make site not useful to those old browsers anyway! I have seen this many times. Try to surf in IE6 on some "awesome" sites, this is no fun.
I recommend to read: http://www.impressivewebs.com/browsers-tvs/
How to we get here?
1: This site is best viewed in Netscape 4.
2: This is bad, site must be accessible for every browser.
3: Pixel Perfect... (we are here)
4: Progressive Enhancement
Progressive Enhancement will in my opinion will be "future" but for now we must educate to make it future! Like in times when there was sites created for one browser. Developers educate each other, and manages finally start to demand it... always, always the same. So now we are in opposite point.
We just need golden mean.
But for now we must educate, and see if big guys will help us educate users. I think about really big sites, that are pixel perfect now, despite it they announce that they are using progressive enhancement or not. Most of sites just look the same in every browser, and until we have something to prove our managers and clients that: They do that, You should want this too.
Consider this: http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/tutorials/gbs/
Can anyone point to me Yahoo! sites that really use it? I can't find any...
Pleas post any example sites in comments, or if there is already created list show me where.
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