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Re:Principles by CaptSpify on Friday December 23, 2016 @12:06PM (#13245804)
Websites should fail like escalators, not elevators. If your JS isn't working properly, the site should default to just dumping the text. I'll be OK dealing with the consequences of bad formatting.

/rant

Re:Principles by Nadya on Friday December 23, 2016 @12:13PM (#13245837)
>Websites should fail like escalators, not elevators.

I like this analogy and will be stealing it for future use. It's for this reason alone my site is plain text with few images and few styles.

Time to see how my site does in a CLI browser like Lynx or eLinks. :)

Re:Principles by CaptSpify on Friday December 23, 2016 @12:50PM (#13246080)
> I like this analogy and will be stealing it for future use.

Heh, I stole it from someone on here. I purposely built my site to work with minimal unnecessary components (JS, CSS, etc), and that makes it "just work" with things like Lynx. As it turns out, making sites simple also make them more compatible!

Re:Principles by a3n on Friday December 23, 2016 @02:26PM (#13246718)
> making sites simple also make them more compatible!

For some reason (probably that I recently ran across it), this reminds me of:

"designing the system so that the manual will be as short as possible minimizes learning effort."

- Mike Lesk, as quoted in Expert C Programming, Van der Linden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Lesk

Re:Principles by pvg on Friday December 23, 2016 @02:57PM (#13246872)
It sort of ignores the fact that escalators also fail by ripping people apart, maiming or killing them. I'll take the occasional broken back button and crappy contrast.
Re:Principles by Nadya on Friday December 23, 2016 @03:12PM (#13246963)
Operation failure - not structure failure.

If an elevator fails to operate - you can't get anywhere. If an escalator fails to operate - you can use them as stairs.

Re:Principles by pvg on Friday December 23, 2016 @04:18PM (#13247272)
An escalator shredding someone is not a structural failure. Anyway, it wasn't meant all that seriously - just that a quip about failure modes has failed to consider the failure modes.