[thelist] Browser support, drawing a pragmatic line in the sand.

[Matt Warden]

On 5/1/06, Tony Crockford <tonyc at boldfish.co.uk> wrote:
> I'm a freelancer, I code to W3C standards and can get most designs
> "working" in most browsers (or serve them plain text) using various
> hacks and filters.
>
> Certain browsers increase the "check, tweak and test" cycle to an
> uneconomic point.  So I'm thinking I'd like to set out a once and for
> all list that will define which browsers I will code support for and
> what happens to the rest.
...
> what browsers do you sell support for?

I know you're not going to like this answer, but: whatever I need to.

If the expected audience of a site is going to be running Lynx 1.0 on
a 30 year old computer, then I make sure my site works in Lynx 1.0 on
a 30 year old computer.

You may want to specialize in certain browsers, but then you are only
going to be able to give a quality product to a certain segment of the
market: namely, the segment whose audience uses the browsers you code
towards. This might end up being fine, as it might not behoove you to
learn how to support browsers used by the audiences of 1% of the
market.

My point is simply that we seem to continue to think in terms of
browsers instead of the people behind those browsers. IE5 isn't buying
your client's products.

--
Matt Warden
Miami University
Oxford, OH, USA
http://mattwarden.com


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