On 11 Feb 99, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> One recent client had problems and we found out they were using
> Netscape 2.0 (and a Danish version at that!). We figure that's
> around 2% of the market at the moment, but if it's at all possible to
> allow for people like this without major site compromises or such, then
> it's a professional's job to do this.
Couldn't agree more. A professional should never let unproven
assumptions about what browsers his users have govern his coding
practices; otherwise he'll get burned.
It's too easy for those of us utterly absorbed in the Web and its
numerous technical nuances to forget that for many users, it's just a
medium that they dip into occasionally. They don't need or want to be
constantly upgrading, tweaking and testing -- if the browser they
have on their machine works, mostly, they'll tend to stick with it.
I did a small project for a professional institute last year, and was
caught short when I discovered that the image rollovers I'd
constructed weren't working at the client's end. Turns out that
every machine in the office still had MSIE 3.0 -- "That's what they
came with, that's what we still use."
My rule of thumb for any project I do is: "Use the newer techniques
and tricks, but sparingly, and never in a way that will leave users
of older browsers unable to access your site, or staring at error
messages. Because though those users may be small in number, they
will also be alienated forever as a result."
There are many subtle implications to designing things this way. For
instance, I'm still very cautious about using colored table cell
backgrounds; because they've only been generally supported since NS
and MSIE 3+, meaning that if I had white text on a colored cell with
a white page background, users of the older browsers would see
nothing. So I use some color other than white for the text. And so
on.
-----------
Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Web: http://www.almonte.com/
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