Fail-soft

Automatically repairing errors and continuing execution goes against the grain of software engineering, for good reason, but I've come to see that it's what makes the web go 'round. Robert O'Callahan has an interesting market-oriented take on error recovery:

...the economics of error recovery --- the fact that recovering from malformed input, instead of hard failure, is a competitive advantage for client software so in a competitive market it's sure to develop and you might as well put it in specifications...

In other words: ignore the errors, users will love you, and you win. We may not like it, but you fight economics at your own peril.