Posted by Sherman Pendley on 01/09/08 15:39

Travis Newbury <TravisNewbury@hotmail.com> writes:

> On Jan 9, 3:00 am, Diogenes <nos...@nospam.net> wrote:
>> I was dismissed as being off topic.
>
> My question again is why does it matter to the site what browser
> someone visits with? Isn't the mantra "be browser independent?"

In theory yes, but in practice we're often forced to use strange hacks
to work around a certain browser's broken behavior.

The need for "body { font-size:100%; }" for instance, which IIRC is a
workaround for a bug in IE. Here's a hack that's perfectly standards-
compliant, but used only for the benefit of that one browser.

Whether a browser has 70%+ or 5% market share is an important factor in
one's planning. The fact that IE has such a large market share means
that web developers should be aware of it and test their sites against
it - preferably with all of the recent versions of it. And when new
versions of popular browsers are released, we need to stay informed
about whatever new bugs they add to the mix...

Ideally, all this following and testing against this browser or that
wouldn't be necessary, but browser bugs are an annoying reality. We
can't just cover our ears and chant "standards" until the bugs go
away, if we want to attract and keep and audience.

Fortunately, virtualization like Parallels, VMWare, and VirtualPC has
made it easy to test against a variety of IE/Windows versions without
having to build a whole computer lab.

If IE had a hypothetical market share of 5%, then I wouldn't consider
it worth the time to worry about its bugs. In fact, on my CamelBones
site I *don't* bother with testing against IE. CB is a tool for Mac
developers, and all IE/Windows readers are going to quickly realize
that these aren't the droids they're looking for. My logs show IE/Win
numbers that are practically nil.

sherm--

--
My blog: http://shermspace.blogspot.com
Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net

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