network-characteristic gratuitous degradation and broken-first development
There used to be a web design principle "graceful degradation". The idea was that web sites could be made so that a richly-functioning web site, should it find itself on a user agent not supporting every aspect of the platform it wanted, still worked well, doing the best it could with the features available. No web site was ever created that adhered to this principle. The weak thinking behind the "principle" was representative of everybody involved in creating the edifice of shit passing for the "architecture" of the web. There followed a related design principle, "progressive enhancement". The idea with this one was that a web site should function correctly on a minimal set of platform componenets (not that anyone would or could know what that minimal set consisted of, in general or per site). If the user agent happened to support additional features, the web site was allowed to use these to enrich the experience. Neither design principle ...