RE: The Age (AU) Technology Not Supporting Old Browsers

Hi Peter,

As I have stated, I do think The Age implementation of these technologies
and standards, in general is not too bad, and in some areas, quite good.  I
know of blind readers who do read The Age on line.

I do feel there is a lot that can be learned from the collective knowledge
on this list.  There are many people here who are very well versed in these
issues, experienced and knowledgable web developers, how to use markup and
deliver well designed pages, with excellent use of CSS, that have both
elegant visual design, and also are marked up so that user-agents for no
visual users "see" what they need to see, while sighted users also only see
what they need to see, all in the same page and CSS.

It would be great to also see the implementation of a well designed
print.css on news sites.

I hope you stay on this list and we can learn from you as well and your team
as well.

Regards
Geoff Deering

  -----Original Message-----
  From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of Peter Ottery
  Sent: Friday, 23 April 2004 12:47 PM
  To: 'w3c-wai-ig@w3.org'
  Subject: Re: The Age (AU) Technology Not Supporting Old Browsers


  hi, was just pointed to this thread and subscribed.

  I cant speak for the whole f2 organisation as there are a multitude of
people involved with these sites, but to respond quickly to some of the
points that have been discussed:

  re >> Geoff & others wrote: <snip> old browser message... makes the site
look foolish

  we're removing it. it was originally intended to (hopefully) ease the
shock of seeing an un-designed page if you were a NS4 or similar user. We
are aware this message is actually doing more harm than good, & is
potentially wrong, so its being removed.

  re >> Geoff wrote: But to cut out browsers older than early 2004????????

  sorry, no, on the page in question we say "From early 2004, f2 network
sites will no longer offer support for browsers earlier than Microsoft
Internet Explorer 5, or Netscape Navigator 6". We are still "supporting" IE5
(as an example) which was released much earlier than 2004 ;-)

  re >> Michael wrote: <snip> Netscape 4.76 ... Totally illegible.

  In NS4.72 (agreed its not .76 but) you get an unstyled page with white
bg/black text. is it possible custom OS settings may override the browser
settings and give the offending grey bg/grey text?

  re >> Michael wrote:  <snip> Does this mean f2's brazen breach of
  accessibility standards will likewise crush the opposition ;-)

  Again, I cant speak for the entire organisation - um, ok, I'll try ;-)

  We are making a genuine concerted effort. We look to organisations and
email lists like this one for knowledge and guidance. We are serious about
doing anything we can to improve the sites we create. In the department i
work with, creative services, we feel that css has some huge advantages to
the way we work and the commercial success of the company, and at the same
time can (once we get it right) provide the most accessible sites we
possibly can. There are other departments (people that work on the CMS,
serving ads, editorial, membership etc etc) that we will be continuing to
work with to improve the quality of user experience.

  Right now we are taking some massive (and frankly i think quite brave)
steps in changing the way our sites work for the better. From simple stuff
like getting headings into <h> tags and lists into <ul> tags right up to
full-blown css layouts that are intended to give us more time to devote to
things like accessibility rather than hacking tables together.

  I genuinely appreciate the feedback :)  & am happy to try to respond to
any other q's that may be relevant to the list - if not, feel free to email
me directly offlist.

  cheers,
  pete


  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  Peter Ottery
  Head of Design
  f2 Network

  (02) 8596 4450
  pottery@f2network.com.au
  www.f2.com.au