Martin Holmes wrote:
At 09:10 AM 30/06/2004, you wrote:
as a user, if it won't run with my preferred browser, I just abandon it and never come back to look at it again
I think the pact should go like this:
The developer promises to write code which is compliant with modern, open, non-proprietary international standards (e.g. XHTML, Unicode, ECMAScript, etc.).
The user agrees to install one of the many free browsers which is capable of handling the current standards.
Hear, hear! I agree completely -- well, almost. If you're primarily delivering static content, it's not all that hard to arrange your XHTML, CSS and JavaScript so that it degrades gracefully. My on-line OE grammar (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/research/rawl/IOE/index.html) does reasonably well in this respect, I think: it looks best in Mozilla, acceptable in IE 5/6 and readable in NS 4.blech. (There you can also see my stylesheet philosophy: a default stylesheet, one for the visually impaired, and an option to turn off stylesheets--for the PDF set. Separate stylesheets for different browsers is madness--Microsoft spends its money that way, I believe.) For the kind of advanced functionality Martin was describing earlier, I think there is no harm at all in expecting users to have an up-to-date browser. My own case in point is the Old English Aerobics anthology (http://www.engl.virginia.edu/OE/anthology/index.html), which really doesn't ask all that much of a browser, but doesn't run in NS 4 and never will.
Peter