[thelist] Stop the Hate - IE6 isn't so bad!

Jon Hughes jon at phazm.net
Wed Oct 24 08:48:48 CDT 2007


> In terms of business, in our case site hits / visitor numbers aren't
> that important. We provide some specialized document management service
> for construction projects and companies, and people in these projects
> are supposed to use our web environment in order to, well, keep track
> of documents, do collaboration, ... . Most of our working time
> we actually spend on building backend / core logic, and talking about
> browser compatibility, bottom line / oldest browser we have to support
> is IE 5.5. By now, trying to find the lowest set of technologies and
> standards usable by all browsers in a sane way has proven to be the
> best approach in terms of time used to maintain the web frontend.
> Looking at our browser stats, I see it's rather diversified, ranging
> from old Netscape / IE 5.5 installments to MSIE 7, having a huge share
> of Firefox and especially Opera users out there. And I fancy with the
> idea of dumping (X)HTML for these things anyhow and solely rely upon a
> Java applet / webstart app to completely dump all this browser nonsense
> for that purpose. ;)
> 
> Cheers,
> Kristian
> 


I certainly envy your position! :)

If I could just make everything completely java/flash based, I would be a
much happier man.  Unfortunately, I still have to worry myself with
accessibility and SEO, both of which are pretty much slaughtered by using
applets instead of plaintext content.

I really appreciate your input! I should have added a disclaimer in my post
about how this relates only to certain sites, not all :)

Thanks,

 - Jon




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