Graham

[..]

> > It must also be borne in mind that the cost of developing a cross-browser application
>  > minus the cost of developing an IE-only application divided by the 
> number of non-IE
>  > customers must be greater than or equal to the average profit 
> generated by non-IE
>  > users over the lifespan of the site being developed for it to be 
> viable in a business
>  > sense.
> 
> It is seldom business sense to annoy potential customers, because an 
> annoyed potential customer talks to other potential customers, and the 

I concur, but one must draw a distinction between a) "potential customer" and b) "person with access to the internet". a) is a subset of b), but the reverse is (clearly) not true.

> fallout that results is huge. One of the local banking conglomerates 
> here did a study of their customer service, and found that due to the 
> resulting word of mouth, each "service related incident" resulted in 
> them losing one customer per incident. People in technical positions 
> would be well served to learn some marketing skills to put their designs 
> into perspective.
> 
> But regardless, there is usually no direct cost involved for building a 
> website cross platform, as doing so by and large means knowing which 

I would agree if you're talking about a very flat site with a table based layout with lots of images and spacers. If; however; one wishes to separate style from content, then all one has to do is scan the archives of this very list to see how quickly time spent standardising the appearance of a site across browsers disappears.

> technologies to use for the task at hand, and which technologies to 
> avoid (unless you have special needs, as we had above). There is however 
> a temptation to use "cut rate labour" to produce sites in an effort to 
> reduce costs, hiring a less experienced developer for less money, who 
> then produces a website that only works on the browser that happens to 
> be installed on their desktop. This however is false economy - you get 
> what you pay for.

Enter the Dreamweaver/Frontpage crew; and although this may be false economy if your budget is large and sustained, if you have £500 in cash and you need a website then you have a choice: spend £500 on a website or do without.

My opinion is not aggressive in either direction - but decisions on how to move forward with website development differ from situation to situation and there are very few principles (with business sites, anyway) that are applied across the board. Those people who produce their own accessible sites that conform to all current W3C guidlines on all technologies usually have the luxury of not being bounded by budget and forced to pass every decision by a committee of non- or semi-technical suits.

Regards

Chris Marsh