Jargon: Graceful Degradation

Graceful Degradation, in computing, denotes the fault tolerance capability of a system, technology or product. In web-designing, it refers to blocking advanced features, that cannot be handled by older browsers, without garbling the display or generating errors. Forward compatibility as offered by HTML, is a nice way of browsers ignoring stuff that cannot be understood. In multimedia, it demands bit-rate adaptation based on available bandwidth, without jitter or freezing.