... the browser transformed from being an awesome interactive document viewer into being the world’s most advanced, widely-distributed application runtime.
If only that were actually true. In reality, we're designing the interfaces for these applications using a presentation language made basically for desktop publishing. For interactivity, we essentially have one more or less shite language (http://bonsaiden.github.io/JavaScript-Garden/) to choose from. We're still arguing over the very basics on whether we should use callbacks, promises, generators, etc. for simple sequential operations. Hell, we're still trying to figure out how to get a reasonable call stack record to debug when working with any of these options. And God help you if you want to use a modern language that compiles to Javascript and have your debugger too.
But to address the author's original point, I think progressive enhancement is alive and well. While the majority of browsing is done on the desktop, I just think it makes way more sense to think first about presenting your basic content and then enhancing it than how you're going to strip out all the bells and whistles to get your design across on less capable platforms. In the long run, the former will probably save you more time and QA effort. It's just more natural to think about using capabilities when present then working around their absence.
And no one says your baseline should to a screen reader for all possible web apps. Just pick a the baseline that makes sense for what your doing, and enhance from there. At some point, it may make more sense to fork your platform and have separate implementations for different pieces of your interface. It doesn't have to be one monolithic project that magically enhances from mobile phone screen reader all the way up to VR cave.
If only that were actually true. In reality, we're designing the interfaces for these applications using a presentation language made basically for desktop publishing. For interactivity, we essentially have one more or less shite language (http://bonsaiden.github.io/JavaScript-Garden/) to choose from. We're still arguing over the very basics on whether we should use callbacks, promises, generators, etc. for simple sequential operations. Hell, we're still trying to figure out how to get a reasonable call stack record to debug when working with any of these options. And God help you if you want to use a modern language that compiles to Javascript and have your debugger too.
But to address the author's original point, I think progressive enhancement is alive and well. While the majority of browsing is done on the desktop, I just think it makes way more sense to think first about presenting your basic content and then enhancing it than how you're going to strip out all the bells and whistles to get your design across on less capable platforms. In the long run, the former will probably save you more time and QA effort. It's just more natural to think about using capabilities when present then working around their absence.
And no one says your baseline should to a screen reader for all possible web apps. Just pick a the baseline that makes sense for what your doing, and enhance from there. At some point, it may make more sense to fork your platform and have separate implementations for different pieces of your interface. It doesn't have to be one monolithic project that magically enhances from mobile phone screen reader all the way up to VR cave.