[thelist] Site review please

[Scott Brady]

Original Message:
> From: Thibaut Allender <mailing at capsule.org>
> it's a vicious circle... we can talk about this for ages
> my philosophy is : educate people, adapt site so that it's accessible,
> but don't correct every old browser bug... let them die slowly, don't
> encourage the use of dinosaurs...

I agree.  However, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't ignore any browser that's older than a year. It doesn't hurt to test in Netscape 6 or 7, especially if your site's stats show them to be a decent percentage of your audience.

In my most recent client's site, "Netscape" browsers made up 6.7% of all visits (I'm assuming that "Mozilla" is included in the "Other" category, which is only 4.4%) in January.  Almost 50% of the Netscape visits (about 3.3% of all visits) were Netscape 6 (it says Netscape 5, so I'm assuming that means 6 -- stupid versioning system of Netscape), 31% of Netscape were Netscape 7.  Together those account for more than all of Mozilla.

Older versions of Netscape are far less significant in our statistics, so we don't even bother testing in NS4.  

> btw, visiting your site with netscape 4 is funny, there's a strange
> redirection making browser loop on the first page (nice to put some
> servers down ;)

For my own site, thanks for pointing out the problem.  I had initially tested the "low version" of the page in the past and it worked fine. I seem to have made a change in the stylesheet without testing NS4 that caused that loop.  Strange.  It's fixed now.

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Scott Brady
http://www.scottbrady.net/