Baseline progressive enhancement

Support for view transitions for regular websites (as opposed to single-page apps) will ship in Chrome 126. As someone who’s a big fan—to put it mildly—I am very happy about this!

Hopefully Firefox and Safari won’t be too far behind. But it’s still worth adding view transitions to your website even if not every browser supports them. They’re the perfect example of a progressive enhancement.

The browsers that don’t yet support view transitions won’t be harmed in any way if you give them the CSS for view transitions. They’ll just ignore it. For users of those browsers, nothing changes.

Then when those browsers do ship support for view transitions, your website automatically gets an upgrade for those users. Code you’ve already written starts working from one day to the next.

Don’t wait, is what I’m saying.

I really like the Baseline initiative as a way to track browser support. It’s great to see it in use on MDN and Can I Use. It’s very handy having a glanceable indication of which browser features are newly available and which are widely available.

But…

Not all browser features work the same way. For features that work as progressive enhancements you don’t need to wait for them to be widely available.

Service workers. Preference queries. View transitions.

If a browser doesn’t support one of those features, that’s fine. Your website won’t break in that browser.

Now that’s not true of all browser features, particularly some JavaScript APIs. If a feature is critical for your site to function then you definitely want to wait until it’s widely supported.

Baseline won’t tell you the difference between those two different kinds of features.

I don’t want Baseline to get too complicated. Like I said, I really like how it’s nice and glanceable right now. But it would be nice if there way some indication that a newly-available feature is a progressive enhancement.

For now it’s up to us to make that distinction. So don’t fall into the trap of thinking that just because a feature isn’t listed as widely-available you can’t use it yet.

Really you want to ask two questions:

1. How widely available is this feature?
2. Can this feature be used as a progressive enhancement?

If Baseline tells you that the answer to the first question is “newly-available”, move on to the second question. If the answer to that is “no, it can’t be used as a progressive enhancement”, don’t ship that feature in production just yet.

But if the answer to that second question is “hell yeah, it’s a progressive enhancement!” then go for it, regardless of the answer to the first question.

Y’know, there’s a real irony in a common misunderstanding around progressive enhancement: some people seem to think it’s about not being able to use advanced browser features. In reality it’s the opposite. Progressive enhancement allows you to use advanced browser features even before they’re widely supported.

What’s new in web - YouTube

Nice to see Clearleft’s browser support policy get a shoutout from Rachel during her Google IO talk.

Baseline’s evolution on MDN | MDN Blog

These updated definitions makes sense to me:

1. Newly available. The feature is marked as interoperable from the day the last core browser implements it. It marks the moment when developers can start getting excited and learning about a feature.
2. Widely available. The feature is marked as having wider support thirty months or 2.5 years later. It marks the moment when it’s safe to start using a feature without explicit cross-browser compatibility knowledge.

I’m more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I’ve built since | by Mike Hall | Jul, 2025 | Medium

I don’t normally link to articles on Medium—I respect you too much—and I do wish this were written on Mike Hall’s own site, but this is just too good not to share.

And don’t dismiss this as a nostalgiac case study from the past:

At no point did the constraints make the product feel compromised. Users on modern devices got a smooth experience and instant feedback, while those on older devices got fast, reliable functionality. Users on feature phones got the same core experience without the bells and whistles.

The constraints forced us to solve problems in ways we wouldn’t have considered otherwise. Without those constraints, we could have just thrown bytes at the problem, but with them every feature had to justify itself. Core functionality had to work everywhere, and without JavaScript crutches proper markup became essential.

This experience changed how I approach design problems. Constraints aren’t a straitjacket, keeping us from doing our best work; they are the foundation that makes innovation possible. When you have to work within severe limitations, you find elegant solutions that scale beyond those limitations.

A Web Component UI library for people who love HTML | Go Make Things

I’m obviously biased, but I like the sound of what Chris is doing to create a library of HTML web components.

Hiding elements that require JavaScript without JavaScript :: dade

This is clever: putting CSS inside a noscript element to hide anything that requires JavaScript.