Grade components, not browsers

At Filament Group these days, we try to build our sites out of modular, independent components, and we document them for our clients that way as well.

In taking a component-driven approach to building websites, we’ve found that the browser features required to offer an A-Grade experience of a particular component become much easier to document. Further, we’ve noticed that a particular device may support a mix of A and B grade features based in it’s unique capabilities. We need a better way to declare that this mix of grades is both expected and normal.

To properly define and set expectations for how our sites should work across browsers and devices both now and in the future, we’ve made a simple change to the way we define browser support: We no longer grade browsers – instead, we grade components.

An approach you’ve actually been doing all along when using things like Modernizr for example. Arguably suggested use for Modernizr was more a graceful degradation kind of way instead of progressive enhancement one. — In the end though, the result was the same: making sure that browsers which don’t support feature X also get to see/do something.

Grade components, not browsers →

Published by Bramus!

Bramus is a frontend web developer from Belgium, working as a Chrome Developer Relations Engineer at Google. From the moment he discovered view-source at the age of 14 (way back in 1997), he fell in love with the web and has been tinkering with it ever since (more …)

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