[thelist] CSS Question (IE 4.5)

[CodeBitch]

> From: Feingold Josh S <Josh.S.Feingold at irs.gov>
>
> Let me question one thing, though.  On BlueRobot.com, he notes that:
>
> "This layout fails in IE4.5/Mac. That browser has poor support for CSS
> absolute positioning, yet it recognizes and executes the CSS @import
> statement used to hide CSS from broken browsers. Currently, there is no
> known solution."
>
> Since this is true, from the perspective of a company which is trying to
> sell products on the web, is using CSS positioning a valid option.  Let's
> assume that 1% of users are visiting their website with that browser.  Is
> the value of using CSS for positioning really more valuable to a company
> than creating accessable pages to that 1% of its population?
>

I'd be very surprised if IE 4.5/Mac has even 1% share of most audiences. At
MacEdition, around two-thirds of our pageviews by humans (excluding search
engine robots) are Mac users, not surprisingly.  Even so, the share of IE4.5
has fallen from about 1.3% in late 2000 to less than 0.1% over the past
fortnight.  The fall has been very steady - I would be happy to send the
data. For a site that is not focused on Macs, the Mac share will be smaller,
and the IE4.5 share of that therefore virtually undetectable on all but the
highest-traffic sites. Usage of IE4.01 by Windows users seems a lot more
common than the usage of this browser.
See http://www.macedition.com/cb/cb_20011231.php for more information on how
to analyse logs for browser usage.

I have discussed browser shares with the proprietor of a large,
entertainment-oriented web site. He found that the only IE4.5 traffic he got
over a period in January was a single IP address.

That said, it may be possible to construct a "hide from IE4.5" mechanism
using a combination of the tricks documented at this URL, to get decent
results in IE4.5.
http://pixels.pixelpark.com/~koch/hide_css_from_browsers/summary/

Hope that helps,
CodeBitch