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Re: Supporting NS4 [WAS: Re: Formatting lists]

for

From: Lori K. Brown
Date: Oct 28, 2002 10:01AM

Leo Smith wrote:

>>Wired can let NN4.7x lapse as a supported browser because it's
>>viewership is so, well, wired.
>>
>>
>
>By "supported" browser, you are referring to presentational support.
>The content at Wired's site is fully accessible (in the broadest
>sense) to any device that can read basic structural html. Therefore,
>their site can support any and every browser.
>
I am referring to presentational support not because I'm not smart
enough to care about standards, but because our customers, who buy our
software, care a whole lot about presentational support. No quantity of
evangelization about standards is a satisfactory answer to 'It looks
awful in Netscape.' Since they care about presentational support, guess
what? So do I?

The problem w/ this discussion and it's analogues throughout the web
authoring community is that folks on your side think that folks on my
side are unimpressed with you being right. You are right. But being
right doesn't buy our software. If we have customers (and we do have a
significant number of them) who are still using NN4.7x and are unhappy
with how no-tables coding looks on their browsers, I have to listen.
It's my job. And writing two versions of every single screen in our
product (a compliant version and a 'pretty tables for brain dead
browsers' version) is truly not viable. So I make compromises all the
time to get things to look as reasonably similar across good and bad
browsers as I can, with a preference for compliance when it doesn't
completely fall over an barf on Netscape.

Everyone says that accessing the web via PDA, webphone, and digital
toaster oven is going to drive a stampede to pristinely standards-based
coding, but I haven't seen it yet. We have a PDA mode for our software,
but there doesn't seem to be much demand for it yet.

Lori


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