> I had a look at the themaninblue.com and wow, that is seriously some
> brilliant work, but I was not able to make any sense out of the lay-out, I
> wish I could.. And what would be the minimum browser that would work in? I
> mean that is just perfect for the audience of his website, but what about an
> audience that has browsers ranging from ie3, ns3 and up?
> 

Hi Taco,

themaninblue.com is a brilliant site (welcome to the list, Cameron), and has
a great write-up on Simon's (American) blog:
http://jessey.net/blog/2003/dec/#e01a

Regarding older browsers like ie3, nn3...

The old theory was that you coded the hell out of every page until it was
locked and exact in every browser on earth. The downside is that this method
does not take into account other user agents such as screen readers, text
browsers, hand helds, printers and possible the most important, search bots.

The more recent theory is that you code for standards compliant browsers and
then allow the layout to fail gracefully in older and older browsers. The
code is lean, so in the oldest browsers (like IE3 and NN3) this will appear
is simple content - with no style. This works well, as long as you start
with good, clean semantically correct markup.

Who wins? You can provide clean content to a wider variety of user agents.
You can also specifically target printers. But most importantly (from a
commercial sense), Google loves it. Like free beer in a pub!

: )
Russ

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