What is the difference between Progressive Enhancement and Graceful Degradation?

Question

I\'m confused on what the difference is between Progressive Enhancement and Graceful Degradation. To me they seem like the same thing.

Answer 1

I find it tends to be attitudinal - are you saying "okay, my site works with Lynx, users can do everything I want them to be able to do, now lets add some panache", or are you saying "okay, my site works in Firefox, now lets try to fix it for people not willing to use that/who turn off javascript/etc"

Answer 2

Graceful degradation is the practice of building your web functionality so that it provides a certain level of user experience in more modern browsers, but it will also degrade gracefully to a lower level of user in experience in older browsers. This lower level is not as nice to use for your site visitors, but it does still provide them with the basic functionality that they came to your site to use; things do not break for them.

Progressive enhancement is similar, but it does things the other way round. You start by establishing a basic level of user experience that all browsers will be able to provide when rendering your web site, but you also build in more advanced functionality that will automatically be available to browsers that can use it.

In other words, graceful degradation starts from the status quo of complexity and tries to fix for the lesser experience whereas progressive enhancement starts from a very basic, working example and allows for constant extension for future environments. Degrading gracefully means looking back whereas enhancing progressively means looking forward whilst keeping your feet on firm ground.