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Blackmoor VituperativeGraded browser support
In the first 10 years of professional web development, back in the early 1990s, browser support was binary: Do you — or don’t you — support a given browser? When the answer was “No”, user access to the site was often actively prevented. In the years following IE5’s release in 1998, professional web designers and developers have become accustomed to asking at the outset of any new undertaking, “Do I have to support Netscape 4.x browsers for this project?”
By contrast, in modern web development we must support all browsers. Choosing to exclude a segment of users is inappropriate, and, with a “Graded Browser Support” strategy, unnecessary.
Graded Browser Support offers two fundamental ideas:
* A broader and more reasonable definition of “support.”
* The notion of “grades” of support.What Does “Support” Mean?
Support does not mean that everybody gets the same thing. Expecting two users using different browser software to have an identical experience fails to embrace or acknowledge the heterogeneous essence of the Web. In fact, requiring the same experience for all users creates a barrier to participation. Availability and accessibility of content should be our key priority.
I particularly like this line:
“Support does not mean that everybody gets the same thing. Expecting two users using different browser software to have an identical experience fails to embrace or acknowledge the heterogeneous essence of the Web.”
I have tried repeatedly to hammer that into the heads of various clients who Just Don’t Get It. It’s about the content.
March 27th, 2007 at 05:29
As a client-server developer, this gives me so much amusement. After ten years of pulling out all of our hair because brwoser makers are too damned lazy, arrogant, and childish to stick to their own standards, web developers have just “given up” and decided that it is OK for X not to work on Browser A and Y not to work on Browser B. How many hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on branched code that begins by [if environment == IE…]?
Gosh, I wonder what it would be like to only have to write my code once?
Developers, you must put pressure on the browser makers if you want this to change! Do not simply accept this as a fact of life. Definitely don’t go out and tell your customers that this is just how it has to be. You are doing more work –frustrating kludges — than you should have to, and your clients are paying for it!
It’s like hearing people say “well, the tobacco companies need money, so we just have to deal with it and keep smoking until we die…”
March 27th, 2007 at 09:52
Personally, what I have been recommending for years is to simply check the XHTML, JavaScript, and CSS for standards-compliance, and leaving it at that. If someone wants to use a broken browser, they get what they get.
To date, I have have never had a client take that advice. In every case, they want me to write kludges and costly workarounds, which are invariably aimed at Internet Explorer — a browser NO ONE should be using ANY version of EVER, due to its outrageously poor security.