Pretending that any resource will always be available is shoddy programming. Check your return values, trap non-fatal exceptions, and always assume remote netwo

Pretending that any resource will always be available is shoddy programming. Check your return values, trap non-fatal exceptions, and always assume remote network resources might not be available. Forget China; there are many reasons an HTTP request to facebook might fail. A website that ignoring errors when fetching a remote resource is bad programming for the same reason ignoring "file not found" errors when calling open() is bad programming.