Re: Target browsers for web development

We have a high percentage of Macs here at Cornell and the default
browser that Cornell recommends is NS 4.08. Why? Well, because they
have a minority, but important, audience who's accounting software is
only supports NS 4.08 - the software manufacturer doesn't support it
outside of that - a 7-8 year old browser? Personally, I find this
ridiculous, unacceptable, and contrary to trying to encourage a
consistent user experience and standards.

So, the main Cornell site uses table based layouts. The person in
charge makes all kinds of excuses that they have to to make it
compatible with NS 4.08. IMHO this  is a cop-out. It can be compatible
without being exactly the same from a presentation standpoint.

At the Lab of O, we know we're ahead of the curve in the education
industry and the rest of the University in terms of moving towards
standards compliance. Fortunately, our Director, while not tech savvy,
realizes the potential of the Net and feels we should be leading the
way. So, he's more than happy to move towards standards, create a site
that's "compatible" with NS 4.x browsers in that the content is
accessible, but the pretty layout is not. This is acceptable for us.
Users get the content with a nice message letting them know their
browser doesn't properly support standards and provides a link for them
to find out more about standards and how they can upgrade to a
standards compliant browser. The following page lists 7-8 browsers with
their advantages, disadvantages, details of what they support, etc.
Users are encouraged to upgrade, but not required.

We've found this solution to work quite well. We've had ONE person out
of around 300,000 in the past two months who decided to send a rather
vicious email about not getting the pretty layout because they were
using NS 4.08. And our NS 4.x traffic runs a little higher than the
average - 2-4%.

On Sunday, April 6, 2003, at 09:12  AM, Shawn Morton wrote:

> Maybe it is just that some many of us are Mac users and feel we should
> always take up for those in the minority using inferior technology :)

Cheers!

Todd R. Warfel

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