[thelist] Dynamic dropdown compatibility with older browsers

[Chris W. Parker]

Hello,

I'm thinking about building a dynamic dropdown interface into my
ecommerce app for selecting product attributes (color, size, etc.) What
I'm wondering about is how much of my audience will be cut off if I rely
on this. I'm not talking about what percentage of my audience will have
javascript turned off, but specifically what are the oldest browsers
that can support functionality like that?

My current userbase is as follows:

Platform:

 Windows 97%
 Mac 3%
 Other 1%

Browser:

 IE 5.5+ 86%
 Firefox 11%
 Safari ~3%
 Other <1%

I haven't yet tried to calculate how many users are browsing without js
but the way I plan to do this is by comparing my webstats software that
is based solely on logs to software that is based solely on js being
available. I doubt there will be any significant percentage of users
without js as visitors to my website generally don't even know what a
browser is. Considering that they very likely wouldn't know js can be
turned off or that there are text browsers available that don't know
what js is in the first place.

For those that are very familiar with js based on these basic
percentages layed our here how much of my audience can I expect to cut
out should I choose to go this route?

If anyone needs/wants to know why I'm thinking of doing this I'll
explain in another email. It's a bit complicated and this email is
already long enough.


(Btw I really don't want to get into an accessibility argument. At this
point I'm just in the pre-alpha planning stages and anything can still
change.)

Thanks!
Chris.