What is the other alternative to graceful degradation?

The other concept is know as progressive enhancement. Progressive enhancement focuses on the content of a web rather than the browsers itself. In this way a website can be viewed on different platforms according to the amount of resources available. For ex a user with the latest browser and a high bandwidth connection might get some extra eye candy as compared to a user visiting the same site on a dial-up and old browser. But the overall functionality provided would be the same. Gmail does so as well where users with slow connections are provided a plain html view whereas high bandwidth users get the complete site to access. This concept recently has come into play as mobile devices with Internet surfing capabilities have started to grow and expand its user base.