In fact, that's what I explicitly stated in my post. For a reminder: [quote] I know that everyone's audience is slightly different, and my own experience is no more than my own experience - doesn't necessarily reflect the internet population as a whole [/quote]
And a little further down .... [quote] Now I know that these figures only represent my own audience, and IE is still the most used browser by quite a long chalk, but it does signify a shift of quite large proportions in my traffic. [/quote] In other words, I don't know if what I observed in my stats is representative of the whole internet or not. It doesn't matter - well it doesn't matter as far as management of this site is concerned anyway. But it certainly represents a shift for my sites over the last few months. For example, for all of 2005 it was rare to see these stats show IE as anything less than 90%. I think if your audience was mostly scientific/academic people, it's quite possible you might have a different browser profile than if your audience was mostly retired pensioners. Also if you're designing an intranet where you have a SOE (standard operating environment) your browser profile would almost certainly be different again. What I'm saying is that whether accounting for IE's quirks and foibles is important or not depends to some extent on your user/browser profile. When I first started building sites, nearly a decade ago, the general idea for most of my clients was to build sites that looked good in IE and simply ignore everyone else because at best they accounted for about 1%-2% of the target audience, and the cost of allowing for them wasn't worth the income they'd produce. As IE has faded in volume, and standards-compliant browsers have ascended, that policy should now be considered reckless. Yet it made sense back then. Nowdays, it makes sense to build for a compliant browser, such as Firefox, and then make hacks and allowances for IE's foibles. What I believe the trend is indicating that in the not-too-distant future, we'll be able to say "build for standards and leave it at that. IE6 users are on their own - it's not worth the additional cost to provide for them." That day will be a good one indeed. Cheers Mike Kear Windsor, NSW, Australia Macromedia Certified Advanced ColdFusion Developer AFP Webworks Pty Ltd http://afpwebworks.com Full Scale ColdFusion hosting from A$15/month -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jan Brasna Sent: Sunday, 2 July 2006 11:08 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [WSG] A seismic shift in browser usage for me .... > how big a "pinch of salt" should one add just to be (somewhat) on the safe side? No answer to this one. I have actually no idea how precisely we're able (and will be able) to measure that at all. That wasn't my point. I only wanted to share that the resource linked isn't actually taking into account that it's valid only for a small set of measuring solutions ans methods. -- Jan Brasna :: www.alphanumeric.cz | www.janbrasna.com | www.wdnews.net ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
