The PE Philosophy Start with HTML

Progressive Enhancement (PE) is the practice of building a usable experience with HTML alone, then layering CSS for presentation and JavaScript for interactivity. Each layer enhances the previous; none is required for the page to work.

HTML is the most resilient layer. It parses partially when malformed, ignores tags it does not understand, and works without scripts or stylesheets. By contrast, a missing CSS file degrades appearance and a broken JS bundle can leave a page unusable.