Jon Aquino's Mental Garden

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Tuesday, December 07, 2004

The "broken wing" strategy

The "broken wing" strategy of error handling simply means that when a software encounters a problem, let it continue on, even if only partially functioning, so that the user can try to save their data (e.g. copy the data to the clipboard).

Counter-example: When Firefox encounters a problem, it displays an error dialog, then closes the whole application. When the error dialog is up, I want to reach behind it and copy the URL on the address bar to the clipboard, but no, it won't let me. And yet I know my data is available - I can see it behind the dialog.

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