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What I teach is that if the site is to be commercial you want as many people as possible to be able to view the site. However, I am certain that as every day passes fewer and fewer of these users exist - when is that group of users going to be a small enough minority so that we can stop writing to them?
Thanks for your thoughts.
Scott
This topic is a hot topic. You can search through many threads on the subject in the "site search" link at the top of the page.
There are statistics galore on the saturation of certain browsers and resolutions, but the general consensus is that a good design should "degrade gracefully" as far back as you can.
There are still some surffers using Netscape 2 on 14" monitors who will never upgrade.
The choice, as a business decision, is to decide what YOU want to support. In my business, I chose not to support anything less than IE 5 and Netscape 7. Yes, I might lose business, but so be it. I design my screens to fit on 800 x 600, anyone with a smaller resolution will have to scroll.
I accept this.
What you are saying is true but I think you are looking at it wrong. You want to create code that is valid [validator.w3.org], and not use proprietary browser code. You want to use a base code level that most browsers can read that your audience uses. I think a problem exists when people design sites to go all the way back to 2.0 browsers when their audience doesn't even use anything below 5.0 browsers.
You can get a good general stat list here:
[thecounter.com...]
Here a thread about code compatability:
[webmasterworld.com...]
It really is the law of diminishing returns [bartleby.com]. I stop at netscape 5 ie5 and 800x600. I also make sure that my site can be seen correctly by spiders [searchengineworld.com] because those are very important browsers.
