You’ve probably heard the phrase “power corrupts”. There’s more to it, but for our purposes, let’s stick with those two simple words. JavaScript is an incredibly powerful tool, and for too long it was a corruptive force on the web. It threw up road blocks, error messages, and way too many pop-up windows for web surfers. It was also greatly misunderstood, which probably contributed to its abuse, and in practice was akin to a dark art.
Not only was JavaScript doing more harm than good, it had also become unruly. Beneath the surface, it was a twisted rat’s nest of code that caused all but the most determined to run screaming; maintenance was a nightmare because of the proliferation of convoluted and often cryptic code forking.
At the time, JavaScript really was ugly by necessity: browsers had yet to implement decent standards support and developers were busy writing spaghetti code of our own on the HTML side. JavaScript had to jump through a lot of hoops to accomplish anything with cross-browser compatibility, even something as simple as an image rollover.
Thankfully, we’re in a better place on both counts now and can finally make our JavaScript a lot cleaner. Still, we have to respect its power and act responsibly. We need to concern ourselves as much with how JavaScript should be used as with what it can do—perhaps more. We need to exercise restraint. Progressive enhancement helps us to do that because it forces us to focus on the content and build out from there.