- From: Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>
- Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 23:36:05 +1000
- To: Olivier GENDRIN <olivier.gendrin@gmail.com>
- CC: Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>, public-html <public-html@w3.org>
Olivier GENDRIN wrote: > On 8/23/07, Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org> wrote: >>> 3. Degrade Gracefully >> In fact, in the statement "new features should work reasonably well >> in older user agents that do not support the functionality" what >> constitutes an 'older browser'? > > Perhaps we can define an older browser as a browser that is older > than 5 years and jounger than 10. And ignore browser older than 10 > years. Or rely on versions (older browser : version n-2, with n being > the most young stable version). I don't think it's a good idea to try and nail down a specific set of qualifications for browsers to be considered, or at least not too specific. It's a guideline only, it's not set in stone, and one needs to consider various factors. One of the major factors is market share. Obviously, the greater the market share, the more users who would be affected and the less likely it is that a feature would be adopted if it doesn't degrade gracefully in it. This would obviously mean that IE 6/7 and Firefox are relatively important, since collectively they currently have the greatest market share. Opera and Safari may (depending on which statistics you believe) each have relatively small market share compared with Firefox and IE, at least in the desktop browser market, but they both also hold a significant portion of the mobile market too. However, older browsers with negligible market share like Netscape 4, IE 5.x, etc. are so insignificant, they're not even worth looking at. Yet a small market share doesn't necessarily mean that some browser should be completely ignored. Lynx, for example, may be used very rarely compared with other desktop browsers, yet even it is sometimes considered. Similarly, screen readers and other assistive technology may have a relatively small market share, but are still quite important. Another factor to consider is the age of the browser and its obsolescence. IE6 is already 6 years old and even though it has been superseded by IE7 and is therefore not as important, it still can't be entirely ignored. Firefox 1.0, on the other hand, is only 3 years old, yet it has been superseded by 1.5 and 2.0, and soon by 3.0. Therefore, Firefox 1.0 could be considered relatively insignificant. Even Firefox 2, which is based on the Gecko 1.8 branch, is somewhat insignificant compared with Firefox 3.0 and Gecko 1.9. It basically comes down to considering the cost vs. benefit of each specific change. Some changes may turn out to be incompatible with some particular browsers, even if those browsers are relatively significant, yet sometimes the benefit far outweighs the cost. For example, something may be incompatible with Firefox 2.0, but be fully compatible with the development versions of Firefox 3.0 and so it may be worth sacrificing a little bit of graceful degradation for the feature. Given the time expected for this spec to be developed, and that new browser versions are being deployed quite regularly, it may be quite likely that today's browser versions will be obsolete before some feature even becomes implemented and used. So the graceful degradation for some features in today's versions may not be particularly relevant compared with the next versions. -- Lachlan Hunt http://lachy.id.au/
Received on Monday, 27 August 2007 13:36:24 UTC