Off topic: Browser Compatibility (was Re: IE7 was Re: [sdiy] Digital noise source project)

[Ben Lincoln]

Samppa Tolvanen wrote:
> No - You do w3c compliant pages. Period.
>   
Being W3C compliant doesn't really guarantee anything. Being 
standards-compliant is great, but if a good chunk of visitors can't read 
your site, what's the point?

It is certainly possible to design web sites that will look at least 
acceptable in every major browser without using conditional code. Here's 
one of mine:

http://browsershots.org/http://www.thelostworlds.net/SR1/index.html

http://browsershots.org/http://www.thelostworlds.net/Software/The_Eye_of_RAW.html

http://browsershots.org/http://www.thelostworlds.net/Library/PC.html

They don't show up on those pages because I changed the design to remove 
them, but I remember a few differences between IE and Firefox for 
example in terms of how they render tables. When I looked into it, I 
could see how the ambiguity in the W3C standard would allow either 
interpretation.

My pages pass W3C validation, but so do Tom's, which (without the 
conditional code) don't display correctly in IE. The vast majority of 
people at this time are using IE to browse the web*; whether someone 
thinks that's a horrifying thing or not is irrelevant. It doesn't make 
sense to shut those people out of viewing a website when it's trivial to 
work around the problem using conditional code (or using a design that 
doesn't require it, but that would mean many more time-consuming 
changes). If someone is going to take the time to share information 
online, they should take a few extra minutes to help make sure that it 
can reach as many people as possible, not play elitist about a 
particular standard or browser of the week being required to view it - 
whether it was IE 4 in 1997 or Firefox/Opera in 2008.

* My employer has a public-facing retail website, so I've heard the 
statistics about our customer base. Not only are most of them using IE, 
but as of a year or two ago a non-trivial percentage were using browsers 
so old that they didn't support 128-bit SSL.