At what point do I throw graceful degradation to the wind?

1. How does graceful degradation work?
2. What does it mean to degrade gracefully?
3. What is the difference between graceful degradation and fault tolerance?

How does graceful degradation work?

So, graceful degradation is the practice of building your web functionality so that it provides a certain level of user experience in more modern browsers, but it will also degrade gracefully to a lower level of user in experience in older browsers.

What does it mean to degrade gracefully?

Graceful degradation is the ability of a computer, machine, electronic system or network to maintain limited functionality even when a large portion of it has been destroyed or rendered inoperative. The purpose of graceful degradation is to prevent catastrophic failure.

What is the difference between graceful degradation and fault tolerance?

The ability of maintaining functionality when portions of a system break down is referred to as graceful degradation. A fault-tolerant design enables a system to continue its intended operation, possibly at a reduced level, rather than failing completely, when some part of the system fails.