Progressive Enhancement VS. Passing Classes – The Student’s Dilemma

My reaction to this week’s material on Progressive Enhancement was a feeling of déjà vu: the practices of PE are already very much in line with the style of coding I’ve picked up at Ai, though I’ve been doing this unconsciously up to the point. We’ve already had the concept of the Three Layers of the Web ingrained in us since introductory scripting classes, and Wayne’s early classes taught us to put a lot of emphasis on structuring our basic content before mixing in CSS and JavaScript. I’ve been making projects in a style that’s more consistent with what’s recommended by PE: starting first with a very basic (and often ugly) XHTML template before adding on more and more layers of complexity to my code.

However, I do feel our experience as students works directly against trying to adopt PE as a consistent habit. Many times once I’ve decided on a topic for my website, there are two factors I have to balance in planning my time out: the parts of the project that I know will take me x amount of time to complete, and the areas of the project which will take an unknown amount of time to tackle. Often, the content-generation side of things falls into the work that I can accurately predict time wise, since it’s the type of stuff I’m very familiar with, like researching online, producing copy, or creating original vector or raster graphics. On the other hand, much of the “unknown” time commitments I have for projects are based on new scripting techniques I’ve just learned in class, or in troubleshooting those techniques once they fail for unknown reasons.

I imagine all of you have then run into the issue here. I usually budget my project time by first addressing the most difficult and time consuming aspects of my project first, thus giving myself enough extra time to handle unexpected issues. I work in this fashion until I hit a point where the amount of remaining time I have until the deadline is about equal to the amount of time I’ll need to complete the “predictable” side of the project, ie: the content! This principle works directly in contrast with PE, since the bulk of the content is addressed after dealing with scripting issues first. But how else can you predictably budget your time to implement stuff you just learned versus stuff you already know how to do? Mere logic demands an approach counter to that of Progressive Enhancement, at least so far as our experience as students. Instructors seem to implicitly agree with this idea too, since they consider it more important that you demonstrate an understanding of the scripting concepts taught in class rather than having your content fully “fleshed out”. How many times have you found this to be the case when grading time comes along?

I imagine a lot of this discrepancy will be fixed once we operate in the professional world, since an equal amount of weight will be placed on the scripting and content sides of any project. Plus, the knowledge we gain from school will mean that more and more of our scripting work will fall into the “predictable” category of time planning for a project – things will fall more into the logical steps laid out by PE. For now however, it seems like our requirements as students will work against our adopting PE in the short term.

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