When developing Javascript-enabled interfaces, developers need to worry about older or incompatible browsers, paranoid users with JS disabled and crawlers. Therefore, depending on the browser's capabilities, it makes sense to enable/disable certain features and have the interface still work.
To do this, there are 2 approaches for development:
- progressive enhancements, in which you start from a purely static interface (or the least common denominator you can start from) and progressively add more and more advanced features
- graceful degradation, in which you start from the featurefull interface and gradually disable features / make fixes to have the interface still work
"progressive enhancements" is not a buzzword as the 2 approaches mentioned above WILL yield different results. Interfaces developed with progressive enhancements will tend to be featurefull on the common denominator, while interfaces developed with graceful degradation will tend to be very rich (GMail style), but barely usable on browsers with not enough capabilities and less accessible by classic crawlers.
Yes, I know "progressive enhancement" is an actual term. I thought it was interesting to hear it coupled with "mobile-first" and "media queries" as it sounded like a bunch of buzzwords.
"media queries" is a new CSS feature with which you can now have "progressive enhancements" (otherwise you would have to drop to Javascript), the advice being that you should start first designing for mobiles, then gradually evolving it into a full wide desktop view.
To do this, there are 2 approaches for development:
- progressive enhancements, in which you start from a purely static interface (or the least common denominator you can start from) and progressively add more and more advanced features
- graceful degradation, in which you start from the featurefull interface and gradually disable features / make fixes to have the interface still work
"progressive enhancements" is not a buzzword as the 2 approaches mentioned above WILL yield different results. Interfaces developed with progressive enhancements will tend to be featurefull on the common denominator, while interfaces developed with graceful degradation will tend to be very rich (GMail style), but barely usable on browsers with not enough capabilities and less accessible by classic crawlers.