PE is the default of how HTML, CSS and JS work. You have to go out of your way to screw it up. Which is precisely what the whole web world delights in doing now.

> PE is the default of how HTML, CSS and JS work.

PE is not what the client pays you for.

> You have to go out of your way to screw it up.

Hardly. The shortest path to the whizzbang the client wants will break PE all on its own.

Quite a lot of websites don't have clients that pay for design - in many cases (especially SaaS), the person wholy responsible for the look&feel target is your colleague the designer, sitting in the office next to yours.

Come to think of it, given how most websites are designed, I'm starting to think we're making a mistake with sticking to HTML/CSS/JS. We should move to "executable Photoshop image" format - so that the beautiful magazine-like layouts made by designers could be implemented without a shit ton of hackery and bloat webdevs have to put nowadays. We could also push some security and sanity decisions into the format this way, so that the tool itself would tell the designers they can't (or shouldn't) do something.

(I'm only slightly sarcastic here.)

> Quite a lot of websites don't have clients that pay for design - in many cases (especially SaaS), the person wholy responsible for the look&feel target is your colleague the designer, sitting in the office next to yours.

Call them boss, call them stakeholder, call them prospects, call them whatever you want, point is, progressive enhancement requires actual hard work, it's not the default state of things when you move beyond the "research paper" format of having a bunch of paragraphs of text interspersed with section titles on a completely static page.

I still disagree - I made websites back in the ancient days when people used to generate HTML server-side. Things worked perfectly well. Current proliferation of heavy JS frameworks buys us nothing over those times, but wastes more electricity and time of our users.

Just because it's the default doesn't make it easiest nor does it make sense as the default necessarily, it's just the default because that's how he web started. I'm not saying we should skip progressive enhancement but there's truth to it being more work (when compared to how easy we can do things without it using JS only), regardless of how the web was originally designed to work.

"Just because it's the default doesn't make it easiest nor does it make sense as the default necessarily"

I used to throw them together in Frontpage or Dreamweaver with a few optional scripts. Scripts for things like page counters or menus I just cut and pasted off dynamicdrive.com followed by tests in several browsers. Backend handled forms and such. Worked on every browser, loaded up fast on dialup, and everyone knew what my HTML/CSS code did without training. Can't say that about most of these sites and frameworks these days. So, I'd say it's easiest and a sensible default.

To be clear, I'm not critiquing complex, web applications that truly need advanced tooling client-side. I'm talking about 90+% of what's out there that just publishes content with minimal dynamic elements needed.

It’s easy to knock something together with JS. It’s very difficult to make it work well, certainly in our experience harder than having reasonable fallbacks.