Someone wrote:
Out of interest, does anyone know how many OS 9 users are still out there?
Amazing timing: 30 mintues ago I got a call from a user of our site (a department in a major public health institution) to say our site "doesn't work" for him. I established that he is using IE5/Mac (OS9). Someone else wrote:
People who regularly use old computer/browser combinations are use to sites refusing them entry, crashing their browser or serving up unusable
chaos as a web site.
If you serve them good clean semantic X\HTML and CSS that does not
kill their browser,
you will be surprised as the positive reactions you will get.
I DO serve up good clean semantic HTML/CSS, but I cannot test for IE5/Mac because I don't have the luxury of having a gazillion computers at my disposal. I do use the IE5/Mac Band Pass Filter to serve a separate sheet, but it only contains styles that are fixes for "known issues" ... everything else that might go wrong is an unknown for me. My explanations about using "current best practice" and "web standards" didn't go down well with him .. He said "every other site works just fine, except yours". He asked "what's so good about it now compared to the old one?" .. and was singularly unimpressed with the answer (especially about accessibility issues: "Well, *I* can't access it, can I?"). He took extreme umbrage at my suggestion that it was a 10 year old browser that even Microsoft doesn't support any more (and our own IT department won't even support Mac), and that it was "a bit of a dinosaur". In the end, all I could do was apologise that I couldn't support the browser he was using due to the constraints of my design environment, and wished him luck with his upgrade (he's been planning an upgrade, but hasn't gotten around to it). I felt deflated and close to tears (yea, I'm such a girl) ... I've worked damn hard on this site, and tried very hard to do The Right Thing all the way along, and tested it as much as I am able (but can't even test IE7 because I don't have XP). He said the one good thing is that at least our catalogue still works for him. Oh, great .. that's something that cost us a small fortune and was built by programmers who don't give a rats about good clean HTML, and makes me shudder with all its nested-table-spacer.gif ugliness. They're out there, folks, lurking, waiting to rise up and destroy ... sunny ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
