Posted by J.O. Aho on 05/11/07 17:25

El Kabong wrote:

> One point I've considered leads me away from the idea of designing for the
> older or more obscure browser versions, since newer popular browsers are
> free for the downloading. Therefore, the question becomes, "is the added
> time and effort (translate to "expense") to develop universally compatible
> pages justified?"

Much depends on what you want to show to the rest of the internet, if you want
to make a "how to fix your microsoft installation after hard drive crash",
then the visitors would most likely be only MSIE users and you don't have to
care much about other browsers.

If you instead make a page, "how to take best care of your horse", you can't
anymore be sure on that your visitors will be using MSIE, it could even be the
minority browser. On a site like this you should be more aware of how it looks
in different browsers and should at least see to that it's useful in the major
browser families, khtml, gecko, opera and msie.

Most browsers handles HTML4 quite well, so if you get your code validated at
the w3c validator, you can assume it's usable by the major borwsers, it may
not look the same in all of them.

Things to avoid, if you want to make the site usable for as many people as
possible, is flash and jscript (microsofts version of javascript), as those
have a limited support when looking at CPU architecture and operating systems.
CSS, specially CSS2 is poorly supported in older browsers, so it could be good
to be sparse in the use of styles (but the number of people using older
browsers are limited, I wouldn't care too much about them).

I do have a number of different architectures on my own computers, and I use
GNU/Linux both at home and at work, when I do for the web is usually made in
mind to work as well on all my computers and working with wap is even more
difficult as the browsers in the phones has even larger variety on feature
support.


> This may seem a moot discussion and perhaps I'm merely looking for
> justification for a lazy man's way out, but I'm very interested in your
> opinions about this.

Of course it's all up to you what you want to support, but bad support can
lead to that your page to get less visited.


--

//Aho

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