No JavaScript means no Internet
I work as a web developer by trade and work on some high profile things and it's pushed me into believing some slightly right-wing things (in development alone that is). Cross platform/browser development is what makes the job difficult and as a natural reaction to this I've grown to dislike bending over backwards to standards.
Standards are good
They just are. Adhering to standards means you annoy fewer people and help ensure that the search engines like your content (by being able to spider and index it more effectively), so this is anything but a rant against standards.
Legacy support is bad
Clients will always request old browsers to be tagged into the specification and it's a necessary evil; explaining to them that IE5 is a dead browser is just a none-starter.
My right-wing solution
If you can't see the website content through lack of Javascript support (on a normal browser - more on that later) then I don't care. At all. I shouldn't have to spend hours to ensure that the minority are comforted by their stupidity. IE6 supports Javascript and I support IE6, anything older and I really don't care.
IE6, PNG's and You
In the above paragraph I stated that I support IE6 and that is indeed true on the most part. I appreciate it's popularity and will ensure my personal projects work on it, but (as you may have noticed) I don't really care for how IE6 doesn't handle PNG variable transparencies. I don't *like* putting horrible alpha-transparency filter CSS on the page just to get an outdated piece of software to do things properly. Firefox is free and renders it properly. Opera is also free and renders things properly. As does Safari. IE7 also does them properly, so I don't bother supporting IE6 (and I have demographic stats to support that decision). Although (for the record) I may bring the IE6 PNG hack into the site to stop it being fugly in that browser, but if it gets done it'll be done reluctantly.
Understanding your goals
The reason I'm happy make such judgements (that other developers would strongly disagree with) is because I understand the goals and demographics of my site. This month (for example) it's around 650-700 visitors a day, 30% Linux users and 70% of all users have Firefox. I see it as a reasonable use of my time to avoid developing for IE6.
Accessibility
I am however a strong believer in accessibility which is why I'll always ensure that my stuff degrades *usefully* rather than niecly. This just means that if javascript is turned off - no content is inaccessible. This means that not only will search engine spiders index my content more efficiently but non-visual browsers will be able to "view" my content. Rather than making the content degrade in a nice way for those without that technology, I make it degrade in a way that the content is visible. It really is a case of determining what is important to you. If you're running a commercial site - then you absolutely need to get your technology degrading nicely (and this is how I perform professionally) but for personal things like Seopher.com - I don't believe that it's worth my time recognising people without "normal" technologies.
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