> I like this analogy and will be stealing it for future use.

Heh, I stole it from someone on here. I purposely built my site to work with minimal unnecessary components (JS, CSS, etc), and that makes it "just work" with things like Lynx. As it turns out, making sites simple also make them more compatible!

> making sites simple also make them more compatible!

For some reason (probably that I recently ran across it), this reminds me of:

"designing the system so that the manual will be as short as possible minimizes learning effort."

- Mike Lesk, as quoted in Expert C Programming, Van der Linden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Lesk

It sort of ignores the fact that escalators also fail by ripping people apart, maiming or killing them. I'll take the occasional broken back button and crappy contrast.

Operation failure - not structure failure.

If an elevator fails to operate - you can't get anywhere. If an escalator fails to operate - you can use them as stairs.

An escalator shredding someone is not a structural failure. Anyway, it wasn't meant all that seriously - just that a quip about failure modes has failed to consider the failure modes.