Topic: View with any browser? (Max)

*Steps out in the hall looking for Max*
ok ... since I always enjoy what you have to say about articles I'll going to direct this to you. You have an ability to glorify or shoot down what needs to be. So what do you think about this?
http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/

I'll jump in and say that it is a great idea - I hate sites that have 'only viewable in ..' notices on them. If taken strictly it would appear to be the opposite of what WaSP are doing but he actually uses browser specific tags so really the webstandards campaign and this one are very similar. It tends to be the advice handed out here - try and make it work in every browser. Of course, this campaign would also be very much easier if people ditched their old browsers and upgraded!!

Just my opinion,

Emps


You're my wife now Dave

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much easier if people ditched their old browsers and upgraded

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Very true, haha

Although I can talk about this a lot, I won't do it this time, heh..

To put it simple (IMHO), you should make your web site compatible with all major web browsers and those are IE4+, NS4, Mozilla/NS6 & Opera5+. After all, most "corporate" web sites still use tables and can be viewed without problems in NS4. Only valid reason not to support some specific browser (i.e. NS4 or Opera) would be lack of some DHTML features, which you simply need to use or your script won't work...

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that my current web site (MAX's World) supports all browsers mentioned above!

Reading through the code on that site I noticed he hasn't updated in over a year and since he's using deprecated tags like "bgcolor" and <b>, I wonder how much progress has been made. Oh yeah, then there's the CSS which has only partial suppport in 4+ browsers. I did learn about this site some years back, but it doesn't seem he's done much with it.

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"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."

-Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996

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Frankly, that statement seems to me about as dumb and short-sighted as Bill Gates' infamous statement about RAM. If one writes to the standards, but only Browser X supports the standards fully and properly, it is not the fault of the web developer if the page does not appear precisely as intended under some other browsers. And what if a standard is not specific about something such as spacing or flow and different browser vendors implement things slightly differently, but still in such a way that they conform to the standard? What about extra effects (opacity, etc.) that do not detract from content in any way even if they are not part of a standard? Superior aesthetics in one browser do NOT equate to less accessibility in another.