Hong Kong Workshop: The Progressive Web: Building for Resilience with Jeremy Keith
- Feb 2018
- Web Design
Last week we attended this one-day workshop in Hong Kong, led by Jeremy Keith. He is a founder of one of our favourite agencies, Clearleft, in the UK.
It was an interesting take on the nuances of modern design and development for the web. Primarily, the need to get away from the ‘pixel-perfect’ mindset that permeated the design thinking of yesteryear.
It’s clear that a diversity of device capability is here to stay. Not to mention other environmental contexts such as network speed and restrictions, human affordances like sight-impairment, adblockers, etc.) . We were encouraged to focus on the core functionality of a website, page, or component, and ensure that this is delivered to users regardless of context.
This is achieved through presenting that core functionality with careful semantic markup, that is understandable by all browser environments. Once that is reliably delivered the designer and developer can play with enhancement layers that add other modern functionality and eye-candy for those users’ devices that can support them.
The idea is a reaction to a tendency in the past for designers, developers, and clients, to equate identical experiences with ‘correctness’ and decree it must be so. Thinking more ‘progressively’ frees us to implement modern, exciting features without fear of hindering the all-important message.
So thanks for that, Jeremy!
