[thelist] Old Browsers old Software, cut bait and move on.

Steve Cook steve.cook at evitbe.com
Wed Jul 11 08:11:32 CDT 2001


Yawn! OK - I'll bite.

The argument about upgrading is just plain unrealistic. Sure I feel like
shouting it sometimes, but if you're coding for business use then the
reality of the situation is that you cater to the audience you expect - not
the other way around.

What about the following situations Brian?
	1) The company who's IS department have locked down machines so that
users cannot upgrade their own software
	2) Users on non-Windows platforms
	3) Special needs users (speaking browsers, large text browsers etc)

If you're coding a vanity site or something tailored to a specific market (a
Pepsi kids site for instance) then go ahead, bust a gut. If you're catering
to the business market however then KISS - most business users aren't
looking for glitz and glamour anyway, they're looking for information.

I agree that for certain sites you can forget about Netscape, but be sure
you know your market. When we analysed our logs, we found a lot of Netscape
users. However one of them was a consultant working for us who uses Netscape
on a Mac. She reported more problems than any other user. I eventually found
that the problems she was experiencing only cropped up on the Mac version. A
closer look at the logs revealed that despite lots of NS users, only one was
a Mac NS user :-) So we decided to ignore the problems that was creating and
asked the consultant to use another browser instead. If it had been a client
on the other hand I would probably have spent more time tracking down the
bugs.

Anyway, I agree with aardvark that it's easy enough to code for all browsers
without having to use separate code. On our site we have perhaps 2 or 3 tiny
workarounds, the rest works in pretty much any browser I've tested it with.

.steve

----------------------------
Steve Cook
web strategist
Evitbe AB tidigare Biljettpoolen
031-15 16 17   0703-13 26 31
steve.cook at evitbe.com     www.evitbe.com
---------------------------- 




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