Kornel Lesinski wrote:
Why do you let 8-year-old browser to stop you from making good pages?
I agree; it's bad enough we need to cater to IE5&6. I look forward to when it's enough for the page to look all right in IE 6 and be functional, but not necessarily as good nor as function as it would be in a compliant browser.
I bet that 90% of Netscape 4 users are bored webmasters ;)
I've for a while thought the NN/IE<4 stats weren't real; either "bored webmasters" or spoofed headers. For the V4.x, I think it's somewhere in between.
Whenever some good solution is mentioned hearing "but Netscape 4 doesn't support this" is unavoidable.
I agree that webpages should be accessible to all - they should work without CSS and JavaScript.
Impossible--you need to draw the line somewhere. For the time being, I think HTML4 should be the bottom line for most cases. I don't see the reason to cater to 3.2 or earlier. As it happens, most HTML4 pages will render acceptably in an HTML3.2 browser. As for CSS and JavaScript, in most cases, the site should be usable without them. While one shouldn't expect a page to be as usable (otherwise, why would they be used in the first place), they should be difficult to use.
Personally I use @import for CSS and use object-detection to gracefully degrade pages. NN4 should be threated as a text browser. It is just too buggy to get anything better.
Unless you're on a very tight budget, some light styling might be in order. Object detection should definitely be used where needed.
These days web looks so bad in NN4 that one more page looking ugly in this dinosaur doesn't matter. Actually it is even better - it proves that finally user needs to upgrade. c'mon! 6 years isn't a short notice!
Any reasonable NN4 user (not necessarily an oxymoron) shouldn't expect pages to look good for them.
The bottom line, however, is to check your stats cater to your users. If your site is a NN4 users' group, then by all means carter to NN4 even over modern browsers.
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