As well the elephant in the room that gets missed is that many rail about the technical correctness without taking into account the target market. Personally I build web applications that replace desktop applications. Progressive enhancement would kill the simplicity of our programming model and literally triple the work effort because we would be in the hybrid world of half server side and half client side.
As it sits, we use a full client side UI library and push all UI concerns into the UI, they communicate with the server via REST to get data and the client is responsible for rendering that data. We research our numbers extensively and the cost analysis of changing our development model to support clients that cannot support full JavaScript clients supports the conclusion "at least for us" that a progressive enhancement development model is not cost effective.
The money recouped with the shortened development cycle of Ajax clients outweighs the amount we would receive chasing some fraction of < 2% of potential clients, If we get to the point that we need to chase that 2% for growth we are a) doing great and b) would be better served segmenting that traffic to a completely independent server framework based UI that it built for those clients.
It is my belief that mixing the two development models gives you the worst of both worlds when it comes to features and maintainability.
As it sits, we use a full client side UI library and push all UI concerns into the UI, they communicate with the server via REST to get data and the client is responsible for rendering that data. We research our numbers extensively and the cost analysis of changing our development model to support clients that cannot support full JavaScript clients supports the conclusion "at least for us" that a progressive enhancement development model is not cost effective.
The money recouped with the shortened development cycle of Ajax clients outweighs the amount we would receive chasing some fraction of < 2% of potential clients, If we get to the point that we need to chase that 2% for growth we are a) doing great and b) would be better served segmenting that traffic to a completely independent server framework based UI that it built for those clients.
It is my belief that mixing the two development models gives you the worst of both worlds when it comes to features and maintainability.