Steve compares “graceful degradation” with “progressive enhancement.” Mostly he takes issue (rightly) with the rhetorical spin that the former applies to the idea of building a website. But I think you can compare them with each other as if they were two different types of crowbar instead: two ways of prising open the task in hand.
There are three main technologies that your browser employs to present HTML for you: XSL, CSS and Javascript. The first two of these are functional: that is, they turn your incoming (X)HTML documents into a set of functions, or behaviours if you like. Because CSS isn’t generally considered a language, let alone a functional one, then it’s worth seeing an example in both languages. Here’s the CSS:
p.intro { color: green; }
And here’s a sort-of XSL equivalent:
If you’re here, then you probably came from here, and you want to make Javascript more functional. If you didn’t come from there—and this is getting a bit like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, isn’t it?—then you might want to go there first, to see if you want to be here.