The Motive Internet Glossary
degrade gracefully/transform gracefully
‘Transform gracefully’ is an equivalent phrase, and although (perhaps) more politically correct, ‘transformed’ often does not do justice to the reality of the resulting user-experience.
To ‘degrade gracefully’ is an ideal where a website can still be used when a browser does not support contemporary standards, or when the user disables non-essential features (such as JavaScript).
Common issues include:
- use of frames (not supported by version 2 browsers)
- Cascading Style Sheets (only supported by version 4+ browsers, with varying degrees of compliance)
- dynamic HTML (dHTML) only version 4+ browsers
- plug-in support (assume that no-one has the plug-in and provide an explanation and link to download the plug-in as standard)
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