Re: IBM Web support -- MIDRANGE-L

Jon Paris wrote:

 >> Second, does it make sense for any business to write off 7% (or more) of
its potential customers? Sure, some can afford to. But 7% may very well give
another business that competitive edge.

Much as I hate the IE situation Hans - Yes - it does make sense.

First of all, chances are your target audience _are_ using IE.  Folks such
as yourself may not be in the target Mom and Pop audience anyway.

Secondly, the 7% aren't all using the same browser!  That number is spread
all over the range of alternates form Notes, to Opera to multiple flavors of
Netscape etc.  So the question really is can a business afford the extra
effort to make their site compatible for all browsers.

You can write vanilla HTML but your site will not be as attractive as your
competitors - so you may lose business.  If you make the HTML compatible on
a browser by browser basis it adds a lot to the cost of
developing/maintaining the site that you are not likely to recoup by the
small portion of the 7% that each set of changes will bring.  And of course
you have made the code less reliable with all the conditional muck that you
have to put in.

I try to avoid features on my site that I know will cause problems for non
IE sites - but the cost of ensuring that it works for everybody exceeds the
potential benefit.

Jon: First, one other poster already pointed out that one of their largest clients is still on NS4, and that they're hardly in a position to make them see the light and upgrade.

That said, NS4 and IE4 usage tends to be buried within the error bars of most usage surveys. If NS4 and IE4 aren't already irrelevant now, they soon will be. In my opinion, unless you still have a large part of your business dependent on one of those browsers, there's little sense in targetting to them.

No, I'm not at all advocating that HTML coders code to the older browsers. But these days, the problem with browser compatibility is not the irrelevant NS4 - it's the IE5 and IE6 browsers that are now the "lowest common denominator". And the maintainers of the IE browser have little motivation to bring it up to more modern standards.

So quite the opposite - I don't want to see "Vanilla HTML". I want to be able to code using modern XHTML and CSS, and I don't want to be surprised when I see how my document is rendered (or mangled) by IE. I think the biggest impediment right now to more widespread usage of CSS is the poor support by IE.

Cheers! Hans

PS. The one feature I'd love to see in a browser is the ability to block Flash animations by domain name.