[thephyber]

I agree to the extent that this is about tradeoffs, hence my last paragraph about “moving the slider”.

USPS makes people who live too far off their normal routes (and presumably the homeless) use PO Boxes to receive their deliveries. That seems equivalent to the website owner using “graceful degradation” for those website features that 2% of browser users can’t use. The article is about website owners who don’t know or bother to use graceful degradation.

Yes, obviously each website owner has to make their own choices about cost/benefit. Except in practice, each product manager doesn’t actually know the cost or benefit of each feature they choose to use which doesn’t have 100% browser compatibility. It’s worth the occasional discussion to highlight these issues, hence the article.