Graceful degradation is what I hope to display as I continue to age... But in the context of web programming it also refers to the supposedly desirable behaviour of web sites to "do something reasonable" as resources are denied them by client browsers such as cookies, applets, javascript, etcetera.
So for example if the browser has javascript turned off pages should somehow "still work". These days javascript is so pervasive that graceful degradation is becoming increasingly difficult and absolutely no fun for web designers and programmers. Question: is graceful degradation for no-javascript feasible and desirable these days? For example after I announced my WHIFF treeview widgets http://aaron.oirt.rutgers.edu/myapp/docs/W1100_2200.TreeView people noted that they sometimes didn't work properly with javascript off. I could fix this in some cases, but the fix would involve changing a "POST" to a "GET" and that would cause MSIE to suddenly fail when the GET parameters get too big (and probably other browsers too). So it really would only fix part of the problem. Consequently I'm tempted to say: "sorry, please enable javascript if you want to use this page..." What is the state of best-practices and such? -- Aaron Watters === she was dirty, flirty / musta been about thirty... Stones '60s she was shifty, nifty / musta been about fifty... Stones '90s (what rhymes with 80?) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
