Progressive Enhancement vs. Single Page Apps

Posted by SeanPlusPlus on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by SeanPlusPlus
Published on 2014-04-30T23:07:30Z Indexed on 2014/08/21 4:30 UTC
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design-patterns

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programming-practices

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I just got back from a conference in Boston called An Event Apart.

A really popular theme amongst the speakers was the idea of progressive enhancement - a site's content should go in the HTML, and JavaScript should only be used to enhance behavior.

The arguments that the speakers gave for progressive enhancement were very compelling. Not only is it a solid pattern for supporting older browsers, and devices on a network with low bandwidth, but HTML fails much more gracefully than JavaScript (i.e. markup that is not supported is just ignored, while if a browser throws an exception while executing your script - you are hosed).

Jeremy Keith gave a particularly insightful talk about this.

But what about single page web apps like Backbone and Angular? The whole design behind these frameworks seems to push the developer toward moving content out of the HTML, and into something like a JSON API.

I can not seem to gel these two design patterns: progressive enhancement vs. single page web apps. Are there instances when one is better than the other? Or are they not even antagonistic technologies, and I am missing something here with my mental model?

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