[whatwg] RE: Degrading of web applications

[Jim Ley]

On Fri, 10 Sep 2004 09:14:21 +0930, Chris Were <chris.were at gmail.com> wrote:
> In my original post I was referring to the ability of current web
> applications to degrade nicely to older browsers, whereas I believe
> you were referring to the ability of future web applications to
> degrade nicely to current browsers. 

No, I make no such distinction, degradability is still important -
obviously it depends on your requirements, but even on heavy intranet
"web" applications, I've run into the problems of needing to degrade
to specific other UA's (e.g. Jaws + IE6 aswell as just IE6 due to the
very strict disability discrimination laws in employment) or because
of requirements to empower the users when mobile.

Degradation doesn't mean absolute duplication of behaviour, it just
means the content or functionality is available, often you can achieve
this just by making sure your fancy behaviour is kept away from the
content and doesn't get in the way.

> The point I was
> making is that current web applications don't have a requirement to
> degrade nicely for older browsers if they're built using technology
> only available to the latest browsers.

What sort of technologies are you talking about?  the xmlhttprequest
object for example can easily degrade - easier than most things of
course as it can truly control the HTTP headers.

Jim.