[thelist] Site redirect check : old browser

Mark Cheng mark.cheng at ranger.com.au
Wed Jun 6 22:44:12 CDT 2001


Hi everyone,

this thread was getting a bit fragmented so I'm going to consolidate my
responses to the points from yesterday into 1 message. I'm also going to
rename a couple cos they are interesting in themselves.

many thanks for the comments and input - I am listening and learning heaps
:)

**********From Aardvark***************

so, what are the numbers?  or, better yet, who, specifically, are the
users?  have you polled their existing clients?  their most recent
prospects?  what to the numbers look like there?
********************************************

1)  Some background - our research indicated (this was based upon a simple
google search of browser stats) that ie5 was the predominant browser in use.
I've gone back today and updated for april 01 from these sites:
websnapshot.mycomputer.com, ews.uimc.edu, w3schools.com.  Based upon those
numbers, the ie5+ percentages were : 76.2%(not including AOL versions), 72%,
79% respectively.  No info was available on NS6 because Netscape was bundled
v4.5+, so I'm not counting anything for that.

We (myself and the Executive Directors) discussed that here and agreed that
it was ok to design for ie5+, NS6 equivalent, but that we did not want
anyone with less than that to hit the main site - because we didn't know
what would happen.

As most requests we receive are for the latest annual, quarterly or press
announcement (or employment!) and the number of hits(which is v low )
increases whenever we put something like that on the site, we decided to put
a text only site together containing just those three documents, to help the
immediate needs of those users who did not have a getElementById browser.

Therefore, we hope (being the operative word) that we will meet >95% of the
needs of the users (even if they can't see the whizz bang site).  If the
stats of the new site come up with something different, then we'll obviously
reconsider.

*****From Aardvark*******
granted, and i suspect this will work for you precisely because you
don't need to do all the things with it that would benefit from a true
split between style (markup and CSS) and content... i don't think,
however, that you've got it quite right...

*****from .jeff***********
the concept you're missing when we use the term "separation of content and
style" is that the content is not contained in the same file as the rest of
the html for the design of the site.  you have a header file which contains
all the html from the top of your layout down to the point where the content
begins.  you also have a footer file that contains all the html from the
point where the content ends to the end of your layout.



2)  Using the definition of style which includes markup, i agree that I have
not separated content from style. Full separation doesn't sound as hard to
do as I thought. Thanks to .jeff for the ssi links - time to continue my
learning :).  I think that I have separated style from markup, which was the
intention, as at the time we didn't plan to serve this site up to anything
but web users, so i didn't need to take into account WAP, Palm etc (I still
don't know what RSS is?)

******* From aardvark *******
and because you view div/span as generic tags to which you can
apply styles, you are embedding them within your content to do
just that, which means you are embedding *style* (layout) into your
markup... they have no semantic meaning and impart no structure,
so therefore they exist only to style (by breaking up content and
acting as anchors for CSS)...

3)  What you say is true.  However, those named div classes and named div
identify classes of objects throughout the site.  so - #content is the
container for the content on the page irrespective of what the content is.
I agree that to change objects from class to class I'd have to edit the HTML
(and to change the content of the object I'd have to edit the HTML).  If
I've planned the objects right I don't care what they are called, I will set
style information for that class of objects.

Knowing that those references apply only to a particular class of objects,
I've integrated that into the JS code, particularly for DOM assignment of
event listeners.  that means that if I want to change the mouseover,
mouseclick or whatever action of that group of objects, I can assign it in
the JS, without changing the HTML (because there are no mouseover etc
attributes  specified in the HTML). (and before anyone checks the code, yes
there are still a couple in the HTML, but there won't be by the time the
site goes live.)

that why I view them as object markers, not as style - but your point is
true.


*** From lots *****

Object to the wording


4) Ok the wording is changing.  I'm starting a separate thread on when it
might be appropriate to redirect - interesting topic.


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