[thelist] Scope Questions [now also browser/target audience c onsiderations]

[Jonas Bohlin]

Hey,

Stating that any browser.x and up can sometimes be a killer as well,
especially if you head into the mac-verse... What you need to do, instead of
stating the latest and one release prior (which is close to ripping your
client off), is develop the site to be compatible for the target aduience of
the site you are building. there is no other reasonable approach!

If the client already has a site running (most do...) you analyze their
logs. nothing better for that. then you look at target groups, clients of
the client, especially in the case of superlargeinternationalbusinesses
where everything is standard and see what they use. then you go and develop
for that, with exceptions for: screwed-up subversions of odd browsers

without taking AOL into account (sorry, one of the most lamest things I've
ever heard of) general caution tells us this; especially if you're going to
play around with dhtml
win
- IE 4.01+
- NS 4.08-4.75
- NS 6.1+ (which includes pretty much all mozilla based browsers)
- Opera 5+ (not often a player, but it's rising)

Mac
- IE 4.5 (with the exeption of modifying clip and dynamic creation of nested
DIVs with events.)
- NOT IE 5.0 (this baby had some serious birth defects)
- IE 5.1+ (currently 5.1 is latets release, but it's very good)
- NS 4.5-4.75
- Opera 5+ (smoooth operator on the mac)

The could be longer and more detailed if you wanted to.

Anyhow.
A pretty common mistake is allowing the tech-people to jot down the
browser-compatibility issue without letting some market-focused people make
a few reccomendations based on neccessary availability first...

-jonas *eating as he types* bohlin


-----Original Message-----
From: David at softv.net [mailto:David at softv.net]
Sent: Monday, February 25, 2002 4:19 PM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: RE: [thelist] Scope Questions


Hi John,

Not only is this helpful, but I think it is absolutely essential. Trying to
build an app for every browser and every version is an absolute nightmare.
My company develops quite complex apps that require at least moderately
up-to-date browsers.
Stating in you documentation that said app is compatible with Internet
Explorer 4.x
or Netscape 4.x is not a bad idea (as is in our case). Most of our users are
somewhat computer savvy so this is not a problem.

Dave

<%
David Mitchell
Web/Software Developer
david at sofTV.net
sofTV.net
www.sofTV.net
613.729.6400 x268
%>

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