Progressive enhancement is a technique used by web developers to ensure that their pages are accessible to as wide an audience as possible while at the same time trying to take advantage of the latest browser enhancements to provide the best user experience for their users. The basic idea behind progressive enhancement is to start off by creating a basic version of your page that contains your content and semantic markup that is supported by the lowest common denominator browser you intend to target. Once you are done, you can then alter the display and behavior of elements on the page with the use of technologies such as CSS, JavaScript, and Flash.

By designing your pages in this manner, the user and any assistive technologies they use, or search engine spiders, should be able to access your page content, even in the absence of CSS, JavaScript and Flash.

The Spry Team has provided a document that gives you examples of how to use the various Spry components in a progressive enhancement scenario and introduces some techniques and utilities that make it easier to do so. The document covers using progressive enhancements with Spry widgets, effects, datasets and regions. It also provides information about progressive enhancement and the dynamic loading of content related to the following:

• Spry.Utils.updateContent()

• HTML Panel widget

• Data sets without regions

• spry:content attribute with regions

• HTML Data Set with region

For more infomation see the Progressive enhancement with Spry article on Adobe Labs.