Re: Netscape

> I reckon it might be good for all us developers to browser sniff our users
> browsers, and if they use NS4 or any other buggy browser, recommend them to
> upgrade.

You will neeed a rather flexible definition of "upgrade".  For many
people, gaining standards compliance may only be possible by going
to an older browser.  Also, be careful to distinguish between broken
implementation of standards, and incomplete implementations.  Although I
think this is bad for those people who insist on complex layouts, CSS
allows more or less arbitrary subsetting of the attributes supported,
with no means to detect which ones are supported.  I don't think 
any browser has a complete implementation of HTML.

Also, remember that people accessing from the office, or kiosk systems,
or from charitably provided internet cafes may have no realistic control
over the choice of browser and people using internet appliances may be
on a 15 to 20 year update cycle.

In my view, it may be reasonable to ask NS4 users to disable style sheets,
but, if the site is still unusable, it is probably has fundamental problems.
(Some of the above classes of user may have repeat the configuration every
day.)

"Please upgrade" messages are one of the most irritating things that can
happen.  They are often given out inappropriately, because of incomplete
browser sniffing databases or because of confusion between user policies
and browser capabilities (e.g. please upgrade in <noscript>).

Received on Tuesday, 15 January 2002 02:53:33 UTC