Been reading this Steve Champeon interview on meet the makers and like the concept of "Progressive Enhancement" as an alternative to graceful degradation. This is one of the objectives of the design of Hypothecate (although there is still work to be done).

The idea is that rather than designing a site purely for a graphical desktop environment and then providing alternative lo-fi versions or gracefull degradation for old web browsers (or new PDA browsers), you design for the lowest denominator then provide non-essential enhancements for the devices which can make use of them.

yep I know Zeldman blogged this too ;-)