Backward Compatibility

How far do you go?

[Lyndsay]

My client submitted his site to a directory that rejected him because the site crashed - get this - Netscape 4.7.

How far back do you go to make sure your site is compatible with a fair number of browsers?

[jessejump]

>>>> compatible with a fair number of browsers?

To be compatible, all you need is to be able to read the text.

Crashing a browser is something else.
I surf 1000's of sites with NS4 at work. They all display fine.

[rocknbil]

NN 4.7 is the most busted piece of software since Windows. :-)

I design to at least be readable in plain-text if it degrades to that point.

A good way to work is degrade to text only if your modern methods don't work. For example, if you test for document.getElementById, only modern browsers will perform the function. So NN 4.7 would just ignore everything in that function and display your alternate.

But for that to work, you have to have an alternate. :-D

[Robin_reala]

Which is where progressive enhancement steps in :) If you call all your CSS with @import statements (which NS4 doesn’t understand), and wrap all your JS with an if(document.getElementById) then you've only got the HTML left for it. Plain HTML shouldn’t crash NS4.

Well, you'd hope so.

[tedster]

NN 4.8 doesn't crash easily, but sometimes NN 4.7 crashes for no obvious reason -- and in a non-repeatable fashion, too. I think it might be related to the user's session and I'm surprised that any directory would use that as a reason to refuse membership. Quite picky!

[rocknbil]

Just an aside - when NN 4.7 was at the height of it's glory I worked for a company that the CEO would ONLY use NN, in spite of everyone's protests. Additionally I had a customer that was all Mac, and ALSO liked NN for Mac.

Some of my favorite crash conditons were the simplest things, like more than two nested tables in combination with some CSS that would bring about the infamous "Unexpectedly Quit" message on a Mac, probably the only system message more worthless than "Server 500 Error." :-)

[jetteroheller]

this - Netscape 4.7

I started middle 2000 to redirect Netscape 4 users to the web standards org.

Why should anybody support this horror browser?

[rocknbil]

Well, because one of the rules of web development is to never let your ego or limitations in development override the objective, to present your content equally to all visitors regardless of the tools they are using to get there.

[Wlauzon]

.. to present your content equally to all visitors regardless of the tools they are using to get there....

Uhm.. no

There are limits, and NN 4.7 is far beyond that limit.

If you come to my gas station in your 57 Dodge, it is not MY problem that it won't run on unleaded gas.

And NN pre 5.0 is about 1/50th of 1% of all the browsers out there, I would not spend more than about 7 seconds worrying about it.

I am not obligated to back-support every piece of browser trash that was ever published.