Actually I think it's easy to get too anal about it all. The vast majority of users (and by that I do mean the VAST majority) for most site are using only a few browsers. For example, I have been contracting for one of Australia's biggest subscription sites, and the user profile is a group of the most anti-microsoft, pedantic, consumer-oriented people you can imagine. A couple of years ago we agonised about whether to allow javascript on the site. But when the IE4 (and similar) browsers reduced to less than 2% of our traffic, we permitted it. We had ONE - count it .. ONE - complaint. And that from a luddite board member, and a quick trip up to his office with a CD and he had an up to date browser.
A year later, we decided on a similar basis to leave behind us all browsers earlier than IE5. This represented about 3% of our users. From several hundred thousand users per month, we had TWO complaints. We helped them upgrade to later browsers and everyone was happy. Our standard was to build so the site looked ok in IE, NN, Opera at the current agreed minimum (IE5 at the time I'm talking about) and everyone else was on their own. The site has run fine with very few complaints about accessibility and appearance. Yes, there are issues with browsers. And yes, the site might look different on one computer than another. We know we had a bank of computers side by side in our lab to check. But each one looked ok in itself, even though different in colours, layout, sizes etc than its neighbours. This site is an organisation that doesn't want to lose a single subscriber. Someone writing saying "I'm cancelling my subscription because ... " causes a fuss. Major enquiry sometimes. But in order to have effective running of the web content department, they were prepared to cater to the 97% of users and lose the 3% if they wouldn't move up to the current level. Web development is an imprecise business, and inevitably a lot of compromises have to be made. Face it, you're not going to have everyone seeing precisely the same things on their screens. As long as everyone sees something acceptable is what you have to live with. You are never going to get everyone seeing the exact same thing on their screens. For a start their hardware doesn't render the colours identically. So get over it. In my mind, building with web standards has had immediate effects on my bottom line as a one-man developer. My code is simpler. FAR simpler. I can find the bits of the code I want to change faster than before, and paying more attention to structure has meant my code is more structured too. I'm sold on this stuff not just to make the sites accessible and flexible, but for sheer good business in my shop. Cheers Mike Kear -----Original Message----- From: Universal Head [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [WSG] Yep, going slowly insane OK folks, here's my take this afternoon, I'll be interested in your opinions. I'm a one-man design company, have been for almost ten years. I've been making sites and learning the latest tools (not only for the web, but for 3D, print and motion graphics) all that time. So I've course I've embraced web standards. But frankly, despite the evangelical cries of it's supporters, I don't think CSS is ready for prime-time yet. [snip] ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ *****************************************************
