Jonathan, this is a corporate BS. 90% of the market is good enough for the company. It's not good enough for us. We are not a corporation trying to enrich itself. We are an information provider, and no discrimination based on OS or the choice of browser is acceptable. Yes, it may look bad in the older or/and buggy browsers, but it should be *usable*. If someone is stack with NS4 for whatever the reason is, what you are saying is f**k that user, let him figure out how to solve his problem... oops, you just lost a mod_perl user and his "word of the mouth", something that shouldn't happen. On one hand you say we need the site look more appealing, so mod_perl will be more wide spread, on the other hand you don't care about those not living on the cutting edge, what's the result?
You're wrong Stas, I'm not saying "f**k that user" at all. I'm suggesting that we display a page on detection of NS4 that informs the user that the site was designed to be totally standards compliant, NS4 is not standards compliant. Therefore, while we welcome that user to the site, we are simply warning him in advance that some things may look odd (but the site is still useable). I'm not suggesting that we deny him access (or force him to upgrade), merely that he sees an advisory prior to entering the site.
I beg your pardon, how is that different from "f**k" you option? If a user is stuck with NS4 and cannot upgrade, for whatever reason it is (e.g. public PC farm in school, with no HD write access), the advisory doesn't help anything. Do you agree?
Our options are:
1) "f**k" NS4 users - launch the site as is, and wait for the complaints from the NS4 brigade 2) redesign the template and CSS to use tables and other common HTML 4-based "tricks" to control our layout so as achieve 100% cross browser compatibility (and kiss our standards compliance goodbye) 3) keep the original "one-size-fits-all" website 4) launch the site now with an NS4 advisory
> Are there any other options that I haven't considered?
5) using the rewrite trick and supply a different stylesheet. But it seems that we will need more than one additional stylesheet and the maintenance will be a nightmare.
6) fix the problem with NS4. It seems to be a fresh problem.
7) Have you read Allan's fresh IE5 woes? "f**k" IE5 users too?
When this kind of talk starts I'm always thinking that leaving a plain site we have now at perl.apache.org is the best. It works everywhere and nobody argues about it.
Don't take this personally Stas, but that's just plain silly. Would you honestly be prepared to forfeit all of the time and effort invested in the new website? As far as I'm concerned, this is an if-all-else-fails only option.
I said I'm just "thinking", I didn't suggest to fallback. So it's not silly :)
Wait till we announce a preview and people will start complaning that something doesn't look good on their favorite browser X platform Y.
Stas, accept it, this is going to happen regardless of what we do. But the site will evolve and mature and eventually all the little quirks will be ironed out. Of course, this would depend on the site actually being launched - do we have a schedule for this?
Nobody wants to nurse the site. We need to get back to coding and we don't have a full time webmaster to do this work for us. Ideally we want to finish the design and forget about evolving for some time to come and only work on the content. At least this is my vision.
Most likely Allan's suggestions of using tables for formatting were the wisest ones and would have saved a lot of grief.
I agree. I also advocated tables. But the developers (too many for me to remember) have done a remarkable job and built a site that doesn't need tables, that works just as well as an table'd site and that's totally standards compliant. They are to be congratulated and I for one would be happy to have any of them on my team. But we are now asking them to take that design and get it to work perfectly on NS4. Forgive the crap analogy, but that's like asking Wilbur Wright to fly the Concorde!
We still have a problem with some browsers not supporting CSS. Turn off CSS and you will see what I mean.
The current CSS solution seems great, but if you dig deeper it hardly keeps its parts together. e.g. I wanted to make the tail component to be a real tail (coming at the bottom of the page, not at the end of the right box)... no way, I've spent a whole day, and it simply won't work after I've read the w3c advisory and RFCs 10 times and tried all possible tricks. No offense to Allan of course, the browsers simply don't follow the standard. even the advanced ones.
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