To Degrade or Enhance…A CSS story

When building a website that is trying to be compatible with older browsers, you are often faced with a choice. Do you gracefully degrade features or progressively enhance them?

Enhancing

With affordable companies like Honda, they provide a basic car, then allow customers to add enhancements if they choose. This could be great that targets a legacy market or a country where you believe the average user will be on a older browser.

Degrading

Ferrari and other luxury car makers take a different approach. Their baseline model is already top of the line, with some options to further personalize it. For those that are looking for a cheaper model, the resell market for all of those cars tends to still provide a great car. You may not get all of the “bells and whistles” but at least you can say you are driving a Ferrari. As a developer, you may decide most of your users will be using modern browsers. You may provide slight downgrades, but you are concerned with supplying the most modern experience possible.

There is not a clear winner in deciding whether to enhance or degrade a site’s CSS. That decision requires you to understand how your user’s are most likely to interact with your platform and then plan accordingly.