> This is more of a general standards question, but if you are designing a > page for the public in general (in my case a university) at what point ( > % wise _or_ # of browsers) do you say 'Okay this is the site, no more > trying to accommodate obscure browsers/older versions of browsers." ? I > know there is no stand pat answer but I would like to know what > particular people use and if there is a common thinking.
Given that you have a university client... 1) Find out what is in their standard desktop install right now, AND also what will be in their next release. That way you'll get an idea of how the standard install is skewing the stats. eg. you might find a disproportionate amount of IE5.5 or Netscape 6 users, since that's what everyone on campus is using. The good news is that standard installs can be updated - that's why you do them. 2) Universities have to "support everyone" to some extent, although there are still limits. The key term I'd use (for any client) is "supported via graceful degradation" - don't say a browser is "unsupported", since that sounds negative. Instead use @import and other tricks to make sure old browsers get an absolutely vanilla - but functional - version of the site. Voila. "supported". 3) If you're looking at % of market, rank each browser in terms of "incoming" or "outgoing". A new browser with a 5% share is very different from an ancient browser with its last 4% trailing away. That will help. 4) Watch out for obscured browsers - Opera for instance is set to identify as IE6, which makes it a major pain to get real stats if your browser sniffer doesn't see past that. Similarly, some versions of Safari will identify as Mozilla in many stats setups (it has a long and strange ID string). You might also want to collate/collapse the many variations of Firefox and Mozilla - both tend to fragment really badly so to get a real idea you have to add all the bits up. Hope that helps. h -- --- <http://cheshrkat.blogspot.com/> --- The future has arrived; it's just not --- evenly distributed. - William Gibson ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
