Progressive Enhancement on a live chat web service

About the talk

Cbox (https://www.cbox.ws/) is a live chat Web service, and it's twelve years old. Progressive enhancement is (quite accidentally!) in its DNA. In the beginning, Cbox used HTML meta refresh tags to do "sorta-real-time" updates (with tables for layout!). Today, it's all about the Websockets (and responsive design!).

Cbox has gotten there without a pivot or a wholesale rewrite. (Those failed.) On the shifting patchwork platform of the Web, making progress doesn't always mean starting from scratch, at the bleeding edge. We'll look at how progressive enhancement can benefit both new projects and old ones, and we'll also look at its limits: when is PE not enough to get to v2?

About the speaker

Thomas wears various metaphorical hats running Cbox (https://www.cbox.ws/). His favourite is customer support. He discovered this HTML thing back when modems made noises and sent faxes, and he has been hacking away at Web technologies ever since. He enjoys ideas for their own sake, programming for helping (some of) those ideas become reality, and beer for making the results look great.

About you

If you know the basics of how HTML, CSS, and JS combine to produce the user experience on the Web, or have wondered how your project might benefit from a PE approach, then there should be something in this talk for you.

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