Web Development

I agree - we don't.

>I don't understand why some developers make a blanket >statement that 'you must support all browser variants'. >According to my site's stats, only 1% of all visitors >use NS4.

I agree with you 100%. A business must weight the cost vs the benefit when allocating resourcing to making a page compatiable with other browers. My companies statistics are 96% IE 5.5/6 and the other 4% is split among e all the other browers with no clear leader. We've only had 1 vistior with IE4 or less in over a year.

So, with that 4% non-IE users evenly split, how do we spend our valuable time testing and fixing our sites to work correctly in non-IE browers? We don't. It's been decidied it's just not worth it. It is more valuable to use CSS to made the page load quickly and add better features for our user base than to code table-heavy JS hacked pages in order for other users to view our pages.

Now I'll go as far as Making sure the page at least remains usable in Netscape 4 by using @import and the few various hacks, as this doesn't take too much extra time but that' about as far as I'd go for my current employer.

You just have to decide if being backwards complient is going to make you more money or cost you more.

Frank Vollono

Pifalo indicates that 30% of his site's visitors use Safari. Wow! That's not our experience. We still have 2.2% on NS4 and under 1% using Safari. So we still need to consider the NS4 users, unfortunately.

=S

The w3c w3.org has done a great job of setting standard for Web developers and browser deverlopers to follow. Most popular browsers today (IE 5+, NS6+, Safari, Mozilla) support most of the w3's standards.

If you follow the standards of html or xhtml and css then your pages will be readable and usable by all browsers including NS4 -- most pages that follow standards even degrade well in browsers such as lynx (old text based browser).

If we developers will follow the standards then the browser developers will be more likely to follow suit.

I do know that IE and NS/Mozilla don't follow the standards in the same way and there are *some* workarounds that have to be made, but it is much easier to do the workarounds when following the standards.

As programmers, designers and developers we use "best practice" login all the time. But I have known a lot of Web develops who completely ignore the "best practices" -- standards -- set up by the w3c. Why? Following these standards, or extending them the right way, will only lead to a better Web in the short and long run.

Any thoughts.

"I have known a lot of Web develops who completely ignore the "best practices" -- standards -- set up by the w3c. Why?"

Imo, it's because they don't know the standards or why they exist. Perhaps they think they are "designing"!
Btw, I agree with you. It's much easier to follow the standards.

If you have that many users using Safari coming to your site you obviously can't ignore them. But keep this in mind: Safari is based on KHTML, the rendering engine underlying Konquerer, the browser developed for KDE. The two browers of course are not identical, but if you feel you can't justify the cost of new Macs just to ensure Safari compatibility you might consider seeting up a cheap PC with *nix and KDE. I'm guessing the main differences in rendering will be related to fonts, as is the case with gecko-based browsers when going between MS Windows and XFree86.

Of course your other option is just to do everything in Flash (puke) and make sure the majority of your visitors are all using platforms for which the plugin is available.

My wife's a web developer. She says, "I have to. I hate it. I wish it would just die."

Conversely, I can't believe the IE only sites. Shouldn't job 1 be maximization of access to at least all _current_ browsers?

>> Will this work for webpages made without tables and using CSS2? <<

Yes, it will.

You may not be able to create a separate CSS style sheet that duplicates the look of your page in a modern browser, but it's fairly easy to create a style sheet that makes the page legible in NN4.

One way to do it is to make a copy of your main style sheet and edit it to keep all the selectors but strip out all the positioning and fancy formatting attributes. Save the stripped down style sheet and use the technique described in the column to serve it to NN4 while still providing the regular style sheet to other browsers.

You may be able to create an even simpler NN4-only style sheet if your page uses a consistant markup scheme that relies on a few basic tags. In that case, you can create a style sheet for NN4 that makes those tags legible and just omit all the other selectors that create the fancy formatting in your regular page.

Cheers to you
Michael Meadhra