[ale] Browser compatibility? (was: Wachovia web banking seemsto be fixed with Mozilla)

[James P. Kinney III]

I would recommend finding a way to make it work for the older browsers
like Netscrape 4.x as shipped with RedHat and installed by zillions of
people. Not everyone is upgrade happy. 

An article I found (and now can't locate in my bookmarks) pointed out
the obvious about web page design. The information that is being sent
out is either text or pictures. Simplicity pays off greatly in the form
of readability. The web is a radically different medium than print is.
It is more transient. Thus the attempt to make a web page look like
something done on print is folly. 

I also think that if more pages were designed to use the basic
standards, instead of the newer, needs-more-testing ones, maybe the
browser writer would get all the bugs squashed!

But anything that requires javascript to "see" the page at all should be
strictly forbidden!

On Fri, 2002-08-09 at 16:06, Fulton Green wrote:
> Here's a burning question: just how far back should we web designers shoot
> for in browser compatibility? The reason I'm asking is that the website I'm
> designing for a client requires some JavaScript for the DHTML and also uses
> CSS pretty heavily. MSIE >= 5.0 and Netscape >= 6.0 seem to like what I've
> done so far, but Netscape 4.7x totally chokes on the DHTML JavaScript and
> almost totally ignores the CSS hints. I'm almost halfway tempted to throw
> an upgrade nastygram to NS 4.7x users, but I'm curious if I should provide
> at least some sort of compatibility for them, especially since Red Hat is
> now only just removing NS 4.7x from their distro (and other distros might
> still install it by default).
> 
> Thoughts? TIA.
> 
> On Fri, Aug 09, 2002 at 03:53:50PM -0400, Jim wrote:
> > demanded a fix. When you run a business on the Web, it is just idiotic to 
> > lock somebody out. You could even argue that it's a form of discrimination. 
> > If a browser is standards-compliant and meets security requirements, there is 
> > no need to lock anybody out. Period.
> 
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James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
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GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
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