- From: Geoffrey Oxholm (Oazao, Inc.) <goxholm@oazao.com>
- Date: Wed, 09 Feb 2005 15:27:23 -0500
- To: www-validator@w3.org
[The topic of this e-mail has moved away from the specific interests of the www-validator list, but as it was started here I have replied.] Lachlan, Thanks for the reply. CSS Support is in fact the primary issue we are concerned with. What we've found is that when we use any CSS2 (like position manipulation) older browsers (like Communicator 4.74) do not degrade gracefully as one would hope. They display the content -- which might be the strict definition of 'degrade gracefully' -- but they look far from how they are intended to. For a commercial webpage it is crucial that a webpage both be modern and display well in as many browsers as possible. By detecting the browser we are able to determine if the browser is one that we have specifically verified is capable of displaying the more attractive and modern of our pages. If a browser does not meet this qualification, we show it a more basic page. By "more basic" I mean that the code producing the page uses more basic technologies. The result will look much more similar to the more modern page than it would have if we did not have two versions. (We might use a large header image instead of layering a logo over a div tag with a background image, for example.) If you get a chance, use an old browser like Netscape Communicator 4.74 and look at some modern pages. (The ones in your footer will do.) http://browsers.evolt.org has old browsers. It is true that we could create one version of our page that works in both old browsers and in new ones, but as you know, using modern web technologies can significantly benefit the quality of a page. We consider this cloaking a necessary hack, but with regret. It would be much nicer if there were some more fluid way of achieving modern webpages with extensive browser support. (By support, I mean the content actually looks as it should, not just with "graceful degradation.") Thank you for the links, by the way. We also plan to incorporate more use of the Http Accept headers. I suppose we stepped in the wrong direction a bit by choosing to use xhtml. We got the impression from sites like w3.org and many others who use xhtml that xhtml was the way to go. Also, we're interested and inspired by the the logic of xml valid documents in general. When we have to use br tags, we do in fact open and close them as you put: <br></br> but this puts double breaks in some browsers. (A degradation even I will consider graceful.) Thanks again for your feedback. Cheers, Geoff Geoffrey Oxholm Oazao, Inc. http://www.oazao.com/solutions.php
Received on Wednesday, 9 February 2005 20:27:26 UTC