Design48 is the online portfolio of work I have done for a number of corporations over my 40-year career in Silicon Valley. I have also used the titles Thetawaves and Designstudio8 to differentiate my webdesign from my graphic work, and my corporate work from my creative work. But I find it harder than ever to keep these things in separate categories. Fine art blends into graphic design which blends into commercial art and technical illustration. Every art school on the planet now teaches digital art and webdesign. More than ever, artists need to be engineers.

This widget is an example of one that uses the principles of Progressive Enhancement: accessibility, semantic markup, and scripting technology (jquery javascript). My thanks to Jacob Gube at Six Revisions as well as Wikipedia for making all these ideas "accessible" to the non-geeks who are just trying to keep up with the geniuses. And I must add that it would be nice if the people who are interviewing us would at least give us a hint. We are trying not to be dumb.

Progressive Enhancement is a strategy for web design that emphasizes accessibility, semantic markup, external stylesheets and scripting technologies. Progressive enhancement uses web technologies in a layered fashion that allows everyone to access the basic content and functionality of a web page, using any browser or Internet connection, while also providing those with better bandwidth or more advanced browser software an enhanced version of the page. This is in contrast to "graceful degradation."

Graceful Degradation The progressive enhancement strategy is an attempt to subvert (or reverse) the traditional web design strategy known as "graceful degradation", wherein designers would create web pages for the latest browsers that would also work well in older versions of browser software. [Like progressive enhancement] graceful degradation was supposed to allow the page to "degrade", or remain presentable even if certain technologies assumed by the design were not present, without being jarring to the user of such older software.

In Progressive Enhancement (PE) the strategy is deliberately reversed: a basic markup document is created, geared towards the lowest common denominator of browser software functionality, and then the designer adds in functionality or enhancements to the presentation and behavior of the page, using modern technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets or JavaScript (or other advanced technologies, such as Flash or Java applets or SVG, etc.) All such enhancements are externally linked, or "unobtrusive" to the user.

In conformance with Progressive Enhancement techniques, this javascript slideshow widget is designed to be seen in three different possible versions: one with no javascript or css, one with no javascript but with css, and one with both javascript and css. You could think of them as plain vanilla, fudge swirl, and gold medal ribbon. The versions are made possible by jQuery scripting which modifies the html dynamically. And the Photoshop is all mine.