Comments on: Clarification Regarding IE5/Win

By: Kristy Ulrich

Kristy Ulrich — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 21:53:25 +0000

As a designer working on a Mac in an office that is all PC, I find making sites work on many different browsers a challenge.
I just recently (last few months) began using and learning CSS in all the sites I develop. The last few days I’ve run into my first major glitches and they were on IE6 on PC.
I generally end up making the sites I do display properly on IE for PCs even if I lose some of the graphical aspects that looked better on my iMac.
A site I’ve begun developing in my offtime (kaylashay.com) and using it as a playground of sorts for trying new things looked wonderful on Safari on my Mac until I saw it on a PC at work. Now I am upset to have to lose that feel to make it work on the PC, but oh well.

By: Creford

Creford — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 20:49:11 +0000

I often use the Firefox to check on the compatibility of my website.
I think it’s necessary.

By: Skinner

Skinner — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 16:39:56 +0000

IE 5 came as standard with Win 2000 too though, Nikolai Bailey.
I use Opera (because it’s the best), but I refuse to update the exsisting IE on my computer because it takes up far too much space for something I don’t use more than once a month.

By: BD

BD — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 09:28:49 +0000

I am almost at the point myself of just serving up plain-vanilla (X)HTML to any version of IE. I have wasted so much of my good time, both now and in the "hey-day" of my FrontPage clients, that I am seriously considering dropping support for IE altogether on my web site. I no longer accept projects that require any Microsoft .NET crap, since it only really runs right using IE (go figure?), and I inform all of my clients to make the switch. Thanks Dan for a great web site and I look forward to reading your book. After years of trying to punch my monitor in the eye, it will be refreshing to learn a different approach. :)

By: mitchell

mitchell — Sat, 29 Jan 2005 10:26:03 +0000

First of all, great web site!….one of the best Ive seen in terms of clean colorful design, XHTML, CSS, and font control. A real inspiration to me personally!
Second, I think that XHTML has answered everyones questions by default, in terms of whether or not to support IE 5 for PC, for MAC, designing for other agents, and “graceful degradation” of your web sites in general using. What you will find, if you move to XHTML and separate out your presentation from the markup using CSS, is it naturally does a pretty decent job delivering usable content to older agents! Its the style sheets that stir up trouble. Ive found that a simple strategy of import and link tricks which blocks most styles from older agents and delivers advanced layout style sheets only to say, version 6 and greater browsers, means they get your fancy web designs, and the older ones get what I call “linearized content”, or plain text pages, which is what plain xhtml and all those divs become when you disconnect css from those pages. In other words, you can design a style strategy where you send say MAC IE 5 and IE3-5 for PC and Netscape 4 series plain markup without styles or minimal styles, and even though it doesnt make your web site look the same as the newer browsers, its “usable” and “readable” and “accessible” by that tiny percentage of people out there in a simple linear text-reader format. The same applies for addressing most mobile devices as well, many of which still,, like Pocket PC 2002 version, dont support linked styles anyway. The newer ones support everything. But XHTML can send this diverse group “digestible” text-based html content, if you use it wisely.
Thats the whole point of moving to XHTML….it almost takes care of the problem of content delivery and cross-browser issues, for you. Why? Because XHTML is seen as HTML in the older browsers and so comes with some default formatting in all browsers…its essentially the same element set as HTML. So it will allow you to reach say 99.9% of users, if you are creative with how you deliver CSS and who gets which styles. All the many CSS hacks out there in cyberland will help you with that. And as for IE 5-5.5 representing 4% of the market currently, thats also what my logs show….but that is still a good sized demographic that can still see your site. There is only a handful of issues with that agent however, and they can be fixed in CSS so it can and should get your full CSS design. Its not hard to fix those bugs. Just keep in mind, if you do decide to ignore style modifications for say IE 5, you can use a style strick to send it plain xhtml without styles. However, what will you do when IE 7 arrives? You still will need to support IE 6 and its “quirks” for some years to come as well, as it will die the same slow death as version 5. Did you know that IE 6 drops into IE 5 mode or quirks mode when you dont put in a valid doctype? So,thats why, understanding XHTML, your CSS sheets, the browsers quirks, and accessibility now, and delivering the right mix, you can now and in the future give everyone usable content. Excluding anyone is not a good excuse.
The whole premise behind moving to XHTML is inclusion! If you design your xhtml markup well, and content and structure well, most of those issues will resolve themselves and when you test your site with a text-based agent like Lynx, or even Netscape 2.0, you may be suprised at how well your content reads in those simple agents, even if they are less than 1% of users in your servers log files.

By: Sylvia Anderson

Sylvia Anderson — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 15:23:55 +0000

F-i-r-e-f-o-x.
I’m loooooving it. :-)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 14:03:22 +0000

Should we forget about $432 million just to be lazy? No, of course not.
MS has $60 billion cash, why would I fix IE5 quircks for them? I wonder who is lazy…

By: Tony

Tony — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 07:20:58 +0000

Ellen said:
“With MS discontinuing all support for MacIE later this year, we Mac types will all be on Firefox anyways, so the IE obsolescence issue will become moot – but the marginalization one won’t, necessarily.”
That will be interesting, just don’t forget that Safari is there too.
I work as technical support for an ISP, and frankly we don’t provide support for any product no longer supported by Microsoft. At the same time, we only provide browser support for Internet Explorer. If IE fails we refer them to OEM and suggest they install an alterntate browser in the meantime.
I don’t get many calls with people using Macs, maybe 3 or 4 per week, so it really makes me wonder how the policy is going to change for Mac users.
Another note I would like to make isn’t necessarily about IE versions, but IE cypher strength. If the browser doesn’t have a mimumum of 128 bit cypher encryption support ends and we request they upgrade their IE. This is especially important for web designs over a secure server. Just something else to consider when deciding if that 3 or 4% is worth developing for.
However, I agree with most of you, I’m not a novice at CSS, but I’m not an expert either. If my client requests development for all browsers, then so be it. otherwise I’ll let it degrade, sometimes not quite so gracefully.

By: Ellen

Ellen — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 02:11:47 +0000

An important factor that one should probably take into account when mulling over all these flat access stats (.6% MacIE, etc) is the actual distribution of browser types per capita of browser users.
As an academic, for instance, my community accounts for an easy .6 of that .6% – but given our educational and economic demographic, we may well account for many times that % of actual patronage of internet services/resources.
Obsolescence versus marginalization are two different dilemmas that seem to get conflated pretty often. With MS discontinuing all support for MacIE later this year, we Mac types will all be on Firefox anyways, so the IE obsolescence issue will become moot – but the marginalization one won’t, necessarily. A zillionaire or influential visitor using Netscape 4 (or IE5) is a much less likely scenario than a desirable up-to-date target community simply using a non-Windows-based browser.
If anyone knows of any crushingly relevant market studies on browser types & market demographics, I’d be intrigued to see what the breakdown looks like.

By: G. I.

G. I. — Sun, 16 Jan 2005 20:15:37 +0000

OT: Nick Toye, your website’s background color hasn’t been set, so in my browser it’s light gray, because I’ve changed the default white. I guess you’d like to show it white for everyone, wouldn’t ya? :o)