The best things in life are degradable

When we talk about degradability, usually the discussion is about javascript widgets.
Degradability is the property of a web application to maintain much of his functionality even if javascript and other advanced tecnologies are disabled by the client. There are different approaches for crafting a degradable application: some developers choose degradable widgets which transform in normal form elements if javascript is not available (actually, they remain normal form elements), while Gmail has a different and separate plain old html version.
It is really possible that javascript is not used on the client: without taking into account screen readers and strange corporate browser policies, there are very important web users that normally cannot execute javascript and Flash. They are Google crawlers.
Thus web applications degradability is a good idea: enhancing the experience for some users, but still maintain a basic standard interface and functionality.
However, degradability is not limited to javascript libraries.

PubSubHubbub is the ugly name of a protocol for nearly-instant distributed dispatching of feed updates. A PubSubHubbub server for example can sit between blogs and readers: everytime the blog has published a new article, it notifies the server which takes care of informing subscribers, reducing the load on the blog hosting.
The system is degradable in the sense that even if the blog does not implement the protocol and does not notify the PubSubHubbub server when new content is available, the server will still periodically ping the blog at regular intervals to check by itself. The subscribers will get updates more slowly, but the overall functionality is preserved.

Finally, the most diffused implementation of a degradable device is in form of cache, which is a storage area included at the hardware level in every modern computer, and at the software level in nearly every site we visit.
The hardware cache, for example, is a very fast and small piece of memory that contains a subset of the computer Ram's content, which change to reflect the data the CPU will probably ask for in the near future. The CPU normally fetches content from the cache, but does not rely on it: cache misses happen every second.
Still, the hardware cache system have enormous advantages, because most of the time the CPU requests are fulfilled without reading Ram. When central memory access is necessary, data is still available transparently (only more slowly) and the control unit of the CPU can theoretically be agnostic on the cache (but in practice it has to know it very well for optimization reasons).
An hardware cache is so advantageous that commonly there are multiple levels of it in a system (named L1, L2, L3). Another form of cache is the virtual memory implementation.
Degradability is present in every cache since the circuits that it is composed of are costly, and the hardware engineers are satisfied of enhancing data access performance for the local references. When there is a jump to a far routine, the access time is degraded.

A degradability pattern is present in the web, that takes care of compatibility with all the devices that forms the cloud: mobile phones, desktop machines, PDAs, old web servers and browsers. When you are working on javascript widgets or a Flash site, think of the users that do not have the resources to use it.