Cross-browser compatibility
We've got a redesign of the Perl Training Australia website that's in its final stages of testing. Everything seems to be working great until I started compatibility testing.
The site works wonderfully in Mozilla browsers, and reportedly in Safari. It works well in Internet Explorer (MSIE) 6 and 5.5, but without some of the CSS features that MSIE doesn't support. It looks awesome in lynx and w3m (text-based browsers), and degrades nicely in Netscape 4.7x.
The site is horribly, horribly wrong in MSIE 5.0 and 4.01, both of which completely muck up the menus. How long are we going to keep supporting these old, standards-challenged browsers?
Currently investigating fixes, and checking to see how many of our visitors actually use MSIE 4.0/5.0.
Anyone who wishes to check out the new site and provide feedback is most welcome to do so. Either comment on my use.perl journal, or drop me an e-mail.
There are ways to protect IE4.x,5.x from their own stupidity, but thesedays I don't bother, their market share is vanisingly small. If money is important and you don't want to annoy potential customers, then you can get round older IE versions by custom style sheets, either by import tricks or by using the server to sniff the browser and change the style sheet and/or web page on the fly.
See my web design links.
