BC Museums Association Conference 2005: Website Usability Workshop
Gracefully Degradeable
Graceful degradation is the property of a system that continues operating properly in the event of failure of some of its parts. If its operating quality decreases at all, the decrease is proportional to the severity of the failure, as compared to a naively-designed system in which even a small failure can cause total breakdown. (http://wikipedia.org)
How "severe" is using a browser from a few years ago? Should a site stop functioning completely?
How long into the future should your site function?
Modern Browser = Firefox 1.0.7 (2005)
Old Browser = Netscape Communicator 4.8 (2002)
"Ancient" Browser = text only Eudora Web 2.0 (2001)
Virtual Museum of Canada (HTML / Javascript)
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ARTBase: The AGGV Collection Database Online (XHTML / CSS)
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Not Identical. Sometimes not even pretty. But *good enough*. If site is accessible and usable, that's enough.
Firefox,
the "standards-compliant" browser.
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
machine readable
gracefully degradable
adaptable
accessible