Generally graceful degradation is a concept that allows a system to continue to operate properly in the event of a failure of a component. In web design the graceful degradation is a very important area. When a developer creates a website he creates it to take advantage of the latest browser support etc. but care should also be taken to render the website properly on older browsers. In this way the designer is able to get a wider audience by stepping down some of the features to provide basic functionality to people with older browsers. For example while specifying an image in the html css code many time an alt tag is used. This means that in case the image cannot be shown in a browser it will instead show the text specified within the alt tag.