Re: Some questions from CHI-WEB people

> hear when we discuss usability and the web.  Take the case of tables
> versus css.  which will degrade more gracefully in older browsers?  The

That's complicated.  CSS layouts using the full power will degrade most
cleanly in pre-CSS (or CSS disabled browsers), but there are too many
partial implementations of CSS.  NS4 is probably the most extreme -
NS4 appears not to construct the full parse tree, so has difficulty
with CSS which decorates that parse tree.  It also has incompatible and
broken positioning.

I think a strong case could be made these days for encouraging NS4 users
to turn off CSS, but it is unlikely that the message would get across
or be appreciated.

CSS is also to blame in that it is treated as independent hints, when,
to do realistic presentational design one needs guaranteed sets of
features to be implemented.  There are no such guaranteed sets, and
there is no way of writing a set of rules on an all or nothing basis,
so that the rules only take effect as a complete set.

Received on Friday, 28 December 2001 16:59:51 UTC