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by fooqux 33 days ago
Agreed. There may be some situations where I may want to ensure 100% correctness. I'm thinking life or death scenarios, (which if so, maybe should use a different protocol). However, checking the sports score or looking at cat memes isn't that.
2 comments

There are also life and death scenarios where being able to show a broken page saves lives. Imagine there is a storm coming in your area and the government website listing addresses of emergency shelters is barely loading because it is overloaded or because your phone signal is bad. Being able to just load and show half of the page's html content is still better than nothing.
I think anyone of sufficient intelligence can devise an argument to frame anything in life-and-death terms.

Doesn't error tolerance promote developer habits that could lead to complete downtime? During which lives could be lost? Don't our current standards result in more churn of physical hardware? Which winds up in garbage dumps in poor countries? On fire, with toxic fumes? Being picked over by labourers, breathing it in? And losing their lives early?

When you visit an HTTP site, browsers give you a warning screen alongside an option to "open anyways".

We could do the same with sites that are not 100% correct. User are already used to having to click "Open anyways" for older, non HTTPS, sites anyways

Browsers briefly tried that in the early 00s. It turns out that, from a user perspective, that's an incredibly stupid question- the user has no way of knowing how well the page works until they click "yes"!
The same can be said for the security of an HTTP site.