[thelist] Validation > pressure on software companies??

[Bill Mason]

At 06:36 AM 06/14/2002, you wrote:
>Netscape 4.5 is still a broadly used browser and one of the browsers I
>always test on.

I would not call a browser that I read today is down to less than 6% of the
market in broad
use.  (http://www.bayarea.com/mld/bayarea/business/3468253.htm)  It comes
down more to the individual's audience: some sites probably have enough
Netscape 4.x traffic to justify more support for it than others.  Or it's a
business move: the last company I worked for worked closely with
AOL/Netscape providing content for AOL and Netscape.com and doing
co-branding of our content with them.  In the pre-version 6 days, we had to
provide good support for 4.x for their sake, even though it was a minimal
part of our site's traffic.

>I agree that standards are important as a foundation. On top of this you
>can build non standards features that wont show, if they are not suported
>or not incorporated.
>
>Still, a site that does not work on a relatively recent browser is not a
>good design, even if it validates, because the goal is not to meet a
>standard in the end, but serve people a website that functions.

Again I would say that's audience-dependent.  But Netscape 4.5 is a
four-year-old version that's long been overrun in proper support by
competing browsers, and has been known to be a bug-laden problem for all
that time.  I would personally hesitate to call it "relatively recent".

Bill Mason
Accessible Internet
evolt at accessibleinter.net
http://www.accessibleinter.net/