Greetings, On 2006 Oct 26, at 10:22 am, Dennis Melentyev wrote:
Hardly can see any reason to keep text-only browsers compatibility. They are good for running from scripts but not for real surfing. Almost everyone use Firefox/Opera/IE these days.
There are three very different reasons for keeping text-only browser compatibility:
1) Accessibility for vision impaired people who use text-to-speech or braille readers.
2) For small screen devices like cell-phones and PDAs. I can't tell you how often I find myself needing to research a problem in the field (read 'on the subway' when I get a call) where I don't have a laptop, or there is GSM coverage, but not WiFi.
3) Because that's actually the direction in which all Web designers are moving. A Standards Compliant Web site is actually a site in which the content (very simple HTML) is separate from the presentation (CSS). That does a number of things. It makes your site Accessible for the vision impaired which in the US is a legal requirement for all commercial sites. It reduces code maintenance requirements. Using a single CSS file for all of your Web pages allows you to give the entire site a facelift (change colors, logo, menu position from top to side, etc) all by changing that single CSS file. And most important of all, by reducing the content html to it's most basic form and linking all of your html files to a single external stylesheet which is cacheable, you significantly reduce your server load.
All of these disparate problems have a single simple and elegant solution which just happens to be text-only browser compatible.
