Posted on Monday 26th of March 2007 at 12:19 in Web Development

This website is best viewed in [this browser] is bad

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the W3C, has said it best:

"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." and while I agree with him commercially I disagree personally.

Commercially websites should be cross browser and accessible. This means that you should be supporting modern browsers with sensible degrading for older technologies - and IF it is going to be broken for something, you should be able to justify why it can remain broken.

Personally I don't see a problem - as you can see at the bottom-right of this site. The reason I declare what this was designed and built for is because I don't care if it doesn't work in IE5.5. I don't care that the variable-transparency PNG's don't work in IE6. This site is run by me and aimed at tech-savvy people so you're unlikely to be reading this in anything but Firefox but if you are, it's likely it's Safari, Opera or IE7. I have a very militant standpoint on websites to the tune of "no javascript = no internet for you" and I carry this philosophy through to my personal site.

Of course I'm different professionally but Mr Berners-Lee is wrong for Seopher.com. Of course professional sites have outgrown this declaration of compatability but personal sites haven't. Hell, I design and develop the site myself for a specific audience, therefore I'm still catering for the majority. Just thought I'd make comment on this...

 

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We’re not yearning for the bad old days. We want the new day when we can follow better specifications and not have to worry about what is going to happen on each version of each platform and browser.

In order to know something will work everwhere, I can’t rely on any given version of any given web specification. I need to test on computers running a variety of browsers and old operating systems, hack the css (oops, not in ie7), add the javascript (oops, it better work with no js), and do whatever it takes to get something reasonable, and sometimes the results are still undesirable.

It certainly makes sense for many businesses to go through this, if it is in their interest to do so. But there are many not-well-funded sites that don’t have the time or money to spend on this pursuit. I don’t think it makes sense to put the burden on this community, it’s something we would like organizations such as the w3c and the browser makers to solve. If they feel otherwise, then "this site best viewed with safari".


Well that won’t happen for the consumer’s request and plea for choice, even if they choose the same one anyway. I know i’m like that, if there is only one type of thing, even if its the one i get, i’m not happy!
I agree, but i would eventually hope from a designers point of veiw that all web browsers murge into one. But that will never happen.

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