>> IMO there has to be some room for pages that are cutting edge. like functionality for Flash 6 players only?
A good friend is a PHP developer at Qld Uni. He has to put up with old fuddy-duddy lecturers and others that refuse to use anything newer than version 2 browsers - no javascript, no flash. they actually prefer text-only browsers and Eudora circa 1998. poor bastard... cheers barry.b -----Original Message----- From: Toby Tremayne [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, 2 September 2003 3:29 PM To: CFAussie Mailing List Subject: [cfaussie] RE: Your thoughts and Comments on this article. Hi Nick, I agree with some of that certainly - I don't believe it's worth supporting browsers below the stable 4x versions in general, unless for a specific accessability reason or the like, and for most sites it's probably reasonable to support IE 5, NS6.1 and later etc. However the big point is that the site should *work* and be readable / navigable in commonly available browsers - IE, netscape, mozilla, opera, safari and konqueror. Anything fully standards compliant will generally fit that bill... And the above support things like flash as well. If you're using some experimental function that may or may not become widely supported, at the very least it should degrade usefully in unsupported browser. Don't forget that feature adoption is driven by use - if everyone pushed nothing but standards we'd have browsers capable of on the fly SVG rendering by now, which would be nice! The issue I guess is that while I agree it's cool to try out new browser functionality, I for one have never found it "cutting edge" for a site to only work in one persons browser, on one operating system ;) cheers, Toby P.S. besides, flash is stable enough and supported across linux/m$/mac/embedded etc to be considered a standard now, and there's little you can't do in flashMX. Tuesday, September 2, 2003, 3:09:22 PM, you wrote: NG> <cf_Soapbox> NG> So all of our web pages should be viewable any obscure functionality NG> challenged browser available on the market? To do that would force us to NG> design aesthetically poor pages and reduce our design options to only a NG> small core html subset. We couldn't use flash or Java, We couldn't embed NG> sounds/movies/image maps/etc. NG> IMO there has to be some room for pages that are cutting edge. If that NG> cutting edge forces people away because they can't or won't download the NG> specified browser or plug-in then so be it. NG> If we as a developer community vowed en masse to never use an unsupported NG> feature in our pages we'd probably all be out of work very quickly. NG> One of the reasons the internet is what it is, is because companies (Like NG> *Gasp* M$) and people are always trying new things out. I really believe NG> that there needs to be a happy medium here. Service pages like the one that NG> Westpac provides should allow multiple browsers (Or have multiple versions) NG> but there should be no reason why companies and people shouldn't be allowed NG> to stretch the envelope. In stretching the envelope it is often going to be NG> impossible to add backward compatibility. NG> </cf_Soapbox> NG> Well now I've managed to offend y'all, who's gonna win the footy this NG> weekend :) -------------------------------- Life is Poetry, write it in your own words -------------------------------- Toby Tremayne Cold Fusion Developer Code Poet and Zen Master of the Heavy Sleep Virtual Tours +61 416 048 090 ICQ: 13107913 --- You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] MX Downunder AsiaPac DevCon - http://mxdu.com/ --- You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] MX Downunder AsiaPac DevCon - http://mxdu.com/
