By Mat Marquis CHAPTER 5Access is Vital
The Boston Marathon bombing took place on April 15, 2013, and like many
people, I turned to the Boston Globe site throughout the day to find out what
was going on around me — the reasons behind the constant sirens — and
for reassurance that the blasts I heard all day were controlled detonations
carried out by the police. Suffice to say, reliable access to BostonGlobe.com
became very, very important for a huge number of people.
Given the tremendous initial surge and the sustained traffic
throughout the day, and despite the tremendous efforts of the Globe’s
dev and ops teams, it’s easy to understand how their servers started
experiencing some issues. At peak traffic their content delivery network
gave out completely, resulting in a site with no external assets: no images,
no CSS, and no JavaScript.
I’m certain that more than a few of you just winced, but it wasn’t the
disaster you might be envisioning. The site wasn’t as pretty as it could
have been, true, but it worked just fine. Had the Globe relied entirely on
JavaScript for rendering or navigation, or if the scripts and styles weren’t
built on a foundation of progressive enhancement, tens of thousands of
understandably uneasy users would have been left at the mercy of their
search engines for news.
We’ll be talking about progressive enhancement as it relates to
responsive Web design for the remainder of this chapter, but not strictly
in the ways you might have read about it in the past. For us, it won’t
be a matter of simply adding functionality in unobtrusive ways, but
applying that same philosophy to how we load a site’s assets (JavaScript,
CSS, images, and even our markup) in a way that’s best suited to a user’s
context. We’ll work towards building a responsive website that not
only looks tailor-made for any display, but delivers device- and context-
appropriate assets to match.