Simon Willison’s Weblog

Official Google Webmaster Blog: A proposal for making AJAX crawlable. It’s horrible! The Google crawler would map url#!state to url?_escaped_fragment_=state, then expect your site to provide rendered HTML that reflects that state (they even go as far as to suggest running a headless browser within your web server to do this). Just stick to progressive enhancement instead, it’s far less hideous. It looks like the proposal may have originated with the GWT team. 8th October 2009, 5:52 pm

Capital Radio’s London Guide. Worth pointing out: the search / map interface on this page is one of the best examples of progressive enhancement I’ve ever seen. Try disabling JavaScript and see what happens. It seems like most developers just can’t be bothered with this kind of attention to detail these days, which disappoints me. 29th August 2008, 1:48 am

SWFUpload. Fantastic Flash widget for handling multiple file uploads with progress indicators; degrades gracefully to a regular HTML upload field. 16th May 2007, 4:12 pm

Neighbourhood Fix-It. Report problems to your council across the UK. The most detailed Ordinance Survey maps anywhere online, and a superb example of progressive enhancement in action—the maps work without JavaScript, and the site even works without images! 17th February 2007, 5:05 pm